[madhadron]

> how do you guys keep up to date with tech?

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.

[_kb]

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.

[shortrounddev2]

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