How I Stay Up to Date

4 min · 705 words

Technology is an industry much like medicine. If you’re not constantly learning, you’re falling behind and potentially causing harm to your customers/patients. As a software engineer, there are a handful of things I do to try and stay up-to-date with tech and trends in the industry.

YouTube

This is probably the biggest and easiest one to do, though, you’ll need to find “your people”. I subscribe to a few channels that are either generic in their software content, or highly focused.

  1. Fireship
    • This is by far my favorite dev channel on YouTube. The in 100 Seconds series is fantastic and has personally helped me discover new tech and got me interested in trying new things. They also have a handful of tutorials that are easy to follow. They recently started a new series, The Code Report that I highly recommend. It’s both entertaining and thought-provoking.
  2. Ali Spittel
    • Ali’s channel is a terrific resource if you’re getting started in frontend development. Her tutorials are easy to follow, and I feel like they’re really good “real world” type apps, unlike a lot of tutorial fluff you see out there. She has an accompanying blog post for all of her videos here.
  3. LevelUpTuts
    • This channel is like if Fireship didn’t have any jokes and did more, in-depth looks at different tech. This channel is how I learned how to use Sketch for UI/UX design when I was first starting out. Granted, I 1) No longer have a mac, and 2) Probably couldn’t remember how to use Sketch at this point. At least I still remember the principles of design, and, you know, that’s probably what really matters at the end of the day.
  4. ArjanCodes
    • Arjan was instrumental to me when I was learning Python. I like his style of videos, and he does a great job at explaining various concepts.
  5. Modern Vintage Gamer

Blogs

Blogs are a bit more difficult to keep up with because no one uses RSS readers anymore. Even still, there’s a handful I check at least weekly to help stay up-to-date on things.

  1. Scott Hanselmann
    • If you’re in software development for more than a few months, you know about Scott Hanselmann. He’s practically a celebrity in the tech space, and his blog and YouTube channel make it very apparent why. He has posts and videos on a wide variety of topics, and he’s able to distill them down into something that’s both sugar-free and digestible.
  2. Dev.to
    • This is a great place to see trends in the market. Anyone with an account can share anything here, which can be a blessing and a curse, though, I think it’s healthy to have a wide range of thoughts and opinions so that we can discuss and debate them.
  3. Morning Dew/Morning Brew
    • Both of these sites don’t host any posts themselves, rather, they list a ton of other recent blog posts, podcasts, videos, etc. I find it helpful to check both of these out every morning rather than try and hunt down something useful somewhere else. It’s a nice, curated collection of things for me.

GitHub

Last but not least, the GitHub trending page. It makes me sad that this one will be going away soon, because it’s probably my most used resource. Basically, GitHub tracks how many stars (think “likes”) have been given to a repo, and they show you the most starred repos for the day. I find it extremely helpful to see what other developers in the open source community are gravitating towards in a given week. It lets me know what tech I should try out and experiment with.

Conclusion

These are the resources I use to help stay up-to-date. What about you? How do you stay up-to-date with things as a developer? Anything I should check out that I haven’t listed here? Let me know in the comments below. Hope you all have a terrific day! ✌