How I do technology watch

A vast world

The current IT ecosystem has one main characteristic: this is a wide and rapidly growing range of topics. Every day, a new project, library or application emerges. It can be about databases, observability, cloud, systems, network, programming and so on. These topics can be quite broad themselves, e.g. programming itself covers a LOT of things. We live in a fabulous time for tech enthusiasts. But there is one issue: how to follow this big fast train?!

This article aims to share my tips to navigate all of this. Of course, I don’t know all the tricks, and mine may not be suitable for you. But if you have your own, feel free to share them in the comments!

GitHub

The Open Source community is an amazing driver for innovation. When it comes to Open Source, one place stands out: GitHub. This is a great place to start our daily routine.

GitHub provides some useful tools: Trending and Explore.

The first one exposes current trends. If you use it correctly, it will allow you to discover great projects. I set ‘Today’ to the date range filter to have finer results, as the other values tend to be more static. I also like navigating between languages I use the most, like Go or Python. This can help you discover specific libraries which might be useful to you later.

The second tool is Explore, which is a curated list of projects that might interest you based on your GitHub usage. The main downside is the same as on social media: you stay in your bubble, and it does not help you discover new topics. But it is still a useful tool.

Bonus: reading source code can help you improve your programming skills. Even if every piece of code is not perfect, you might learn new approaches.

Awesome Lists and newsletter

Awesome lists are community driven repositories that provide a list of software or resources on many topics. They are often good starting points to find what you need.

An easy way to find them is to search “[topic] awesome list” in the search engine of your choice.

Some examples of awesome lists:

Go: https://github.com/avelino/awesome-go
Python: https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python
IoT: https://github.com/phodal/awesome-iot
Kubernetes: https://github.com/tomhuang12/awesome-k8s-resources

Newsletters are also a way to receive curated content. I have to admit, I don’t follow many, and I prefer websites or RSS feeds. My favorite is Golang Weekly, which promotes articles, code and tools.

Social media

I do not like social media. But I successfully tuned my Twitter account.

The idea here is to play with the famous algorithm, to let Twitter know you are interested in software development, or any other tech topic you like. After some time, you end up with a social media showing off useful information.

If you already have an account, I suggest creating a dedicated one.

Some examples of the accounts I like:

Video, podcast, blog

Another channel that can be leveraged is what I would put under the “content creation” umbrella. Twitch, YouTube, blogs, podcasts are ideal places for everyone to share their knowledge and passion. As with any subject, there is of course good content and not so good content.

I often go to dev.to to see if some articles catch my attention.
I also like ThePrimeagen - I guess many people watch his channel - who comments on content such as articles or videos, and shares his takes. Bonus point: he brings fun into it!
There are many content creators sharing tips and tricks, The Linux Experiment, Jonathan Blow, and so on. Just pick the ones you like.

Don’t fall into the trap

As mentioned earlier, there are a bunch of new things every day. This creates many new trends, some shorter than others. The trap here is to follow every trend. It is ok to be curious and enthusiastic, but do not change your stack too often.

Do not think you can try and follow everything! There is simply too much. On the one hand this is a good thing because you can literally learn something new every day. On the other hand this is also a bad thing, because you can quickly feel overwhelmed. This prevents you from deepening your skills or knowledge because trying to do too many things keeps you on the surface. It is important to have many skills and many tools, but it is also important to sometimes go deeper. But, make sure to keep time for yourself and your loved ones too!

You should prioritize. Do tests and experiments if you have enough time. If you do not, you can always bookmark your new find and come back later to see if you are still interested.

Last but not least, you can also participate by sharing what you found with your colleagues.