I'm starting my carreer now, only have ~2 years of experience, how do you guys keep up to date with tech? I usually read HN and some other news and I love to play around with stuff that I find interesting, are there any other places that I can find new things?
I don't. There really isn't much that's new that shows up. Spend your time exploring stuff people have already done, then learn whatever version of it this employer is using as needed at work. For example, at one job I needed to learn Ruby for a project. But here's an object-based, single dispatch, dynamically typed, interpreted language with some warts. You figure out what they call the inevitable things that are there in such a language and what the warts are, read some code to get a sense for the idiom, and then get on with life. If it's your first such language it feels challenging. If it's your third or fourth, it's just filling in the blanks. SQL Server has lots of warts and differences from PostgreSQL, but the stuff you expect is all there under some name. Any distributed database has to solve the same problems as any other one.
So don't worry about the new things. Worry about the old things with staying power, and the underlying designs and principles and patterns of thought that get reused again and again.
I think it’s the same with most knowledge work: spend the majority of your open-ended personal development time exploring a breadth of knowledge, ideas, and concepts so that you know where to go deep when stumbling into a new problem space.
Yeah once I had been doing web projects for like 2 years, it felt like there wasn't anything interesting to do on the web anymore. I started working on DirectX projects for fun because basically nothing about web dev informs you on graphics. 6 years of web dev experience (plus 3 or 4 of personal projects) and graphics cards make me feel like a noob again, it's wonderful
The best, any maybe only, way is to build things you think are interesting in the technology you want to learn.
Interested in learning the cloud and immutable operating-systems? Write the infrastructure-as-code to deploy a Minecraft server on Fedora CoreOS to Azure.
Interested in learning C#? Build Flappy Bird using Monogame.
Interested in learning how the networking stack works? Write your own TCP client.
Interested in data analysis? Create dashboards to track your budget using Streamlit, Python, and Pandas.
The worse problem with this industry is that we have conditioned people to think they need to do side projects outside of working 40 hours a week.
When I get off work, I shut down my computer and live my life.
“Life” was a part time fitness instructor that was more of a hobby than a job, running races with friends, hanging out, etc until I was 35 and then married (still married) and spending time with my wife and (step)kids until the youngest one graduated in 2020 and doing a lot of traveling with my wife post Covid including doing the “digital nomad” thing for a year.
I’ve been in this industry professionally since 1996 across now 10 jobs. I have only done any coding outside of work for 3 months and that was in 2008 and only because I had stayed at my second job for 9 years and I had become an expert beginner.
I will volunteer to work on projects that give me exposure to new to me technology. If that isn’t available, it’s time to change jobs.
I started my career programming in C across mainframes, PCs, and ruggedized Windows CE devices for the first 15 years, and working in strategic cloud consulting for the last 6 including 3 working directly at BigTech.
I’m completely different. Most of my side projects are code. I briefly gave up spare-time coding in 2017 for CrossFit, and in 2001 for kayaking, and in 2022 for studying Chinese. But it always comes back. I just love to code.
I sure would like to find other things as interesting.
I mostly had R&D-like positions, and working in a new field all the time. I’d like to acquire more domain knowledge outside of finance to grow my own business somewhere, but learning new things has just been so tempting.
Eh, a lot of people in tech enjoy working with tech. So we don't shut down our computers after work because that is punishment. Generally speaking though, the computing I do in my free time is vastly different than the computing I do at the office, though occasionally a skill from one becomes an asset to the other.
(This weekend I rearranged my entire network rack at home while changing out the UPS battery for the first time in... eight years... And then I added support for a leak detection sensor to my home automation code. Most fun weekend I've had in months!)
> we have conditioned people to think they need to do side projects outside of working 40 hours a week
> If that isn’t available, it’s time to change jobs.
From what I've seen most people want to keep their cake and they want to eat it too. They're not willing to change jobs. They're also not willing to work on anything outside of work. Then they complain that their careers are stagnating.
Then again I'm biased. I work on stuff out side of work and I change jobs every 2-4 years so I can work with new technology.
I did exactly that from 1999-2008. I alluded to that above when I mentioned I became an “expert beginner”. I said never again. That was my 2nd job. I’m now at #10
