Keeping up

Thanks to this tweet by Adam Clark and this post by Brian Rinadli I've been thinking about how I keep up with changes in the web development world.

Brian writes in his article that

One of the biggest difficulties front-end developers face can be deciding what is worth paying attention to and what isn’t. If you follow social media, Hacker News, EchoJS or even a handful of blogs, it can be hard to decipher the tools or frameworks that are deserving of investigation versus those that maybe just aren’t there yet.

I agree; there's good signal in those streams. However, it's incresingly difficult to parse the good stuff from the link bait. Brian shares a great list of email newsletters that aim to help cull the noise into manageable chunks of information. I subscribe to Web Design Weekly and Web Development Reading List. I probably only click on 3-4 links in each one, but this approach has worked really well for me for quite some time.

Adam expressed another angle to this issue:

I can’t keep up with my twitter feeds, but everyone I follow is valuable to me. Do I trim down or stop worrying about *keeping up*?

— Adam Clark (@avclark) April 7, 2014

Personally, I gave up trying to read my entire feed a while ago; it isn't feasible. I also try to be selective about how many folks I follow. The harsh reality is that eventually you won't be able to keep up. I recommend News.Me which emails you the top couple links that were shared in your twitter feed the previous day.

I also highly recommend Pinboard's popular page. While not specifically related to web development, I always find a good link or two perusing it every few days.

These tools allow me to relax. Keeping up with the web industry is tough, but this approach nicely limits my twitter check-ins to once or twice a day during the week.