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We have too many technologies in IT world today.

How can be best be able to clear technical funda conceptually ? How do we able to find all the concept available within technology & required to be learnt ?

Programming Experince always matters, but I want to know the ideas keeping experince aside. I mean like if I start developing a project on my own hand, how do I be able to find out about which latest technology & concepts tha I should use with ?

Please suggest.

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closed as not constructive by sunpech, Dori Jul 28 '11 at 7:48

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3 Answers

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There are too many technologies for any one person to learn, let alone a single person who has a full time job with a restricted technology set.

Never the less, many technologies are fairly smiler so knowing one gives great insight into knowing others. Learning your first logging framework will be more beneficial then learning another nine.

Simply knowing that a technology exists is half the battle. When you are confronted with a problem, knowing that there is a library, or a language or what have you designed to solve this problem is a huge help. It means you can learn the technology as you need it, but you are not going down the wrong path as you know the technology exists.

For the technologies you do choose to learn, you want to do three things. Firstly learn about the technology from books and blogs. Secondly implement small projects using the technology. Even if its something really simple like a URL shortner. Thirdly keep inspired and keep your knowledge fresh. Subscribe to blogs, follow people on twitter and listen to podcasts. As soon as you stop doing something you get rusty at it. Keeping it in mind will help you remember.

And the key part, knowing what technologies are available, well start at the top, read websites like hacker news, slash dot or digg. For the technology areas you specialize in follow specific news agregators (like dotnekicks for .net developers) as well as the big names on twitter. Every time they share a link to a new technology, open it up and have a 5 minute read. Then see how many times its mentioned. Interesting popular technologies will be mentioned all the time, these are the ones you want to start paying attention to. Then the next time your employer asks you to solve a task you can say "oh hey we can use technology x, I wrote a small project in it 6 months ago".

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There are different ways and each developer has kind'of his/her own style of learning. But some resources and techniques could be mentioned which are common among developers.

  1. Gather resources (including RSS, books, newsletters, events subscription, etc.)
  2. Follow gurus of related fields (via Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
  3. Keep talking about them with your colleagues
  4. Don't be afraid to educate other people for new technologies you've learnt and remember knowledge shared, is knowledge increased
  5. Try to do a project (a real one if possible, but personal also) on the new technologies
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There are hundreds of new technology and trends are happening around the world. What most of the websites and books are majorly covering about the wide popular technologies. When I joined in my new company with the automation group, what I have seen an entirely different story. It's another kind of trend and technologies associated with hardware and software.

What I am trying to say that, people make their fundamentals strong. They must be more interested in developing their knowledge in timeless concepts like Usability, Design, Architecture and other fundamentals in the Software engineering.

This is the same thing Jeff Atwood mentioned in his blog post

I stock my shelves with books about timeless concepts such as design, process, people, and craftsmanship. Do highly technical books tied to a specific technology have any reason to exist in an era of ubiquitous, high speed internet access? I wonder. I think they're increasingly irrelevant, and almost by definition out of date by the time they manage to hit bookshelves.

You can learn about the trending topics happening around the world. But it would be really helpful to quickly learn the new things if our base is strong.

I use twitter extensively to get updates about the industry and follow several blogs. Whatever most of the people are blogging about web programming and associated technologies, which is one of the hot trends now. Another one is cloud, then parallel programming, real-time data mining and analysis etc. It is your choice which path you to pursue. People like Paul Buchheit even used to foresee trends for the next 10 years

I usually get my hands dirty with native, .NET, and web programming but only for the sake of understanding some excellent architecture implementations, quick prototyping, tools development. For living I'm a native programmer!

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