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Discussion on: How to keep updated with the JavaScript ecosystem?

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nssimeonov profile image
Templar++

While this is an impressive list, I wonder how often are you checking these?

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sergiodxa profile image
Sergio Daniel Xalambrí

I started to check medium less and less, dev.to is daily multiple times per day.

I use RSS for most blogs (personal and engineering) and for EchoJS and I check it usually one time per day, but sometimes I spent a few days without checking it.

The rest is mostly consume as I need, like MDN, caniuse, talks, docs and awesome lists. The most important part is to know there are those resources to use them when I need more information about something.

I also try to go to at least one meetup per month.

Oh and Twitter I use it multiple times per day.

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nssimeonov profile image
Templar++

My point was, that with such a long list - it will consume all of your time just to read all the new articles and having no life is bad - my back and neck already hurt from staying too much behind the computer.

Going to a meetup is a good thing - at least you meet people IRL.

Reading "only when you need it" is not really an option to stay updated, because I often land on very interesting stuff, I never thought of initially, so I usually follow a few related links to other articles, when I read something. However this quickly turns into wasting 2-3 hours, then probably another 2 trying things for fun (which is basically half of a working day).

I have a friend, who reads insanely fast (and is really brilliant) - I can barely catch to read half of the quotes he sends me after reading the entire article.

So the real question is - how much effort do you think one should put to keep up to date with all the new stuff.

PS: I'm a developer for over 25 years now and trying to keep up to date is quite challenging, even-though it's easy to understand it, having so much experience as I have. I can hardly imagine, what it is for someone who also has to pause for a moment and think about what he/she just read to understand it.

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sergiodxa profile image
Sergio Daniel Xalambrí

Ohh I understand now, even if I check some of those resources daily I don't read everything.

I think important to be able to discard something if you don't need it right now, I can still sit and read for many hours when I'm investigation about something and read a lot of articles and docs, but that is unusual.

Most of the time I read the title and that's it, only when a title is interesting or I saw multiple articles about the same thing or multiple people talking and sharing an article I go and read it.

Like if I saw a lot of people in Twitter talking about the library X I read its readme to learn more about it and check if it's interesting to me, then read docs and maybe articles/tutorials.

I don't spent a lot of time trying to be up-to-date.

PS: I'm 26 years old and with a baby, It's hard but not impossible, just learn how to discard, if you know something exists you can go and learn more about it when you really need it.