Hey Devs,
I'd love to know how you guys are keeping up with the latest trends in software development as there are always new things to learn and the best practices to keep up with.
It's nice to mention:
- What are the resources you are using? I mean any blogs/newsletters/youtube channels you follow.
- How often you read or watch tutorials.
- Do you only read if you got stuck in any problems or in implementing any features?
Top comments (6)
Hey Srebalaji, I generally pick a topic or stack I want to immerse myself in. I read and/or watch videos everyday and commit a few hours per week to practice.
Resources:
I'm biased, but more and more my entire strategy is hanging around dev.to. There was a time where that was pretty aspirational, but these ways I feel like the conversations do a great job of filling me in without being too focused on the latest trends. It's a good balanced dialogue.
And when I have a specific concern, I start a new thread!
I don't really care about trends but I like to keep learning, just following my interests. So here's another 3 paragraphs starting with 'I':
I use YouTube to watch conference talks. I don't really need to subscribe to channels, after watching talks aplenty the recommendation engine caught up with my interests.
I recently got a Pluralsight subscription and started learning some F#. That may be considered trendy. The thing that got me interested was seeing some talks by Scott Wlaschin who is also known for F# for fun and profit.
I used to follow a lot of blogs using the good old google reader. The morning brew was one of my favorites, it offered a daily digest of interesting stuff mostly in the .Net realm. For a while twitter seemed like a good enough replacement, following the same people I used to follow with google reader. But lately I see more and more opinionated stuff I don't really care for. So I went back to RSS using Inoreader starting from an empty list. Recent additions I'm enthused about include Programming is terrible and The Digital Antiquarian.
Well to answer your questions, for my specific case.
Hey! I've noticed that in this post you use "guys" as a reference to the entire community, which is not made up of only guys but a variety of community members.
I'm running an experiment and hope you'll participate. Would you consider changing "guys" to a more inclusive term? If you're open to that, please let me know when you've changed it and I'll delete this comment.
For more information and some alternate suggestions, see dev.to/seankilleen/a-quick-experim....
Thanks for considering!
In terms of blogs, I like dotnetcurry and of course, dev.to - I generally see interesting articles from them in my facebook feed.
I used to really enjoy the Code Project newsletter that they sent out, I found it has become more industry news than technical tutorials but still a useful thing to peruse once in a while.
Brent Ozar's blog and newsletter is something I really enjoy for something more SQL server focused.
Youtube channels, I subscribe to GOTO conferences and NDC conferences
Those are a good way to keep up with current industry trends.
In terms of actual tutorials, I prefer tutorials that I can read and build as I learn rather than watch videos.
I find them quicker and I get to build stuff sooner since I can copy and paste directly from the source into my test environment. I generally find that TutorialsPoint has some pretty decent primers on things.
If you're looking for tutorials for something specific, you might want to try hackr.io/ - It's a community driven top x list for tutorials.
I have Pluralsight as part of my package at the company I work for and I have to say, I don't think the subscription style tutorials are worth the money if you're thinking of paying for it yourself.
Going for something like Udemy where you can buy the course once off and then are free to watch the videos over whatever time period suits you just seems like much better value to me. They also have some really good sales, so I just wishlist stuff I like and buy them when they're marked down.
I often listen to podcasts on my commute to and from work, my favorite ones are .NET Rocks and Software Engineering Daily.
Last but definitely not least is a good book. Technical books can be quite expensive but I find that it's a really good way of delving deep into a particular subject. Humble Bundle often has packages where they sell a whole load of them for really cheap though. You can download them in PDF as well as MOBI's so they work quite well on a Kindle.