[gman129]

Great response Igor. This is pretty much how i try to stay up to date. The thing i find frustrating is when you finally become really good at technology often there is already a new out there which you are totally clueless in and feel like you are back to being a junior. Being a programmer for an average intelligent person feels like you are constantly chasing your own tail...

[IgorPartola]

I hear you. There will always be new and exciting technologies that will be developed that will supersede what you've been using. However, remember that not every technology is going to "stick". Instead of trying to chase down the latest and greatest, try to evaluate whether it's an actual improvement over how you've been doing things. For example, I recently learned Angular. It is a great framework and I like how it works. A competing framework, KnockoutJS, is not as good. I learned just enough of it to see that it's not an improvement.

Basically, focus on getting things done and building things. If a part of what you are building seems like too much work, someone probably has already built a solution for that. Otherwise, don't worry about using the absolute cutting edge stuff. At one point there was a tongue in cheek saying that "it would take more time to evaluate the popular JavaScript frameworks than to write a new one" (or some such). It still holds today, so don't sweat the name of the tech and stick to the stuff that you can be productive with.