Monday Questions is a recurring series on Approaching Normal. For more questions like this, please visit the archives.
Technology moves at such a rapid pace that there is constantly something new that is tempting me to explore it. I find it very difficult to pick and choose which things to devote time to learning. So today’s question is: How do you choose what technologies to learn more about, and which to ignore?
Put your answers in the comments below.
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Approaching Normal is the personal site of Larry Wright, a 30-something technologist. I live in the town of Normal, Illinois with my wife and three children.
I have diverse interests, including Ruby on Rails, Agile development methodologies, design, and entrepeneurship. You'll find a little bit of everything here, but mostly technology and business stuff.
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I wait until a technology that I haven’t heard about before is mentioned three times in my normal internet trowling. Then I investigate, and usually it is worth the investigation. This is how I got into Twitter, Jquery and BDD among other things.
I keep a huge variety of feeds on my reader, so whien somebody starts talking loud about anything, have a look at it and sometimes do a cross ref invitation to anyone else to have a look at it too.
The whole idea is no to jump, but to see with somebody’s else eyes if the new kid/gadget/tech in town is that bright.
Like ChillCoder, it’s largely about what gets most noise in my feed reader, though usually that’s filtered through who is talking about it.
If someone I read has a good track record of picking interesting technologies, or is working in a field closely related to something I’m working on, I’m more likely to follow up on what they write about.
For more social tools (twitter, etc) it’s largely about which of my friends are adopting them. They’re rarely much fun if you don’t know anyone else using them.
Unfortunately so much is hyped out there that it makes it hard to choose. I’m much like James and Chilli in that blogs provide buzz about certain new technologies.
That said, time is a limited commodity and even then when I want to look at something I usually have to weigh it against how useful the new technology will be in my job. That’s one reason why I haven’t spent more time in Ruby, there’s enough Microsoft technologies (ie. Lucene.NET, MonoRail, NVelocity) that I need to keep up with that will help in my daily job which keeps me from exploring other languages/technologies.