I’ve written before about the importance of keeping your skills up to date, and this is a followup to a previous post, answering the question ‘how do you decide where you should spend your time?’

You can never keep up with everything, every new programming language, every new tech stack, every new trend; you need to understand and acknowledge that first.

Next, decide what matters to you, and where you want to spend your (limited) time keeping up to date. This is different for everyone, but it could be any combination of:

– keeping up to date with the tech you’re currently working with (all or parts of)

– keeping (or getting) up to date with ‘something else’ that maybe next on your horizon

– keeping an eye on upcoming and emerging tech trends. Trends come and go over time, some last longer than others. You can’t jump on every new thing that comes up, so you need to make your own decisions on whether something is likely to be part of your future or not. In other words, would it be worth investing your time in this trend or not?

The last point is hard when starting out because you have no past experience to compare against, but spending some time reading the chatter online will give you a rough feeling of whether something is increasing in popularity or not.

As with everything, you need to sensibly assess tech trends in order to work out what is pure hype and will never go anywhere, vs things where there’s some substance and is likely to evolve into something you should get more familiar with.

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