It looks like new technologies, especially around web, have been popping up faster than ever. I'm overwhelmed by all the new names I've started hearing. How do you keep up with them and how do you decide which ones to learn?
Any good developer would say they don't keep up with technologies: they just pick the ones that apply to their work. You don't need to study Hadoop 'just because', you study it because it would help you in your work dealing with 'BigData'. Stay away from hype and focus on work.<p>If you're trying to study concepts, it's a different case. You study the concepts, not specific technologies.<p>An example would be MVC. There's a lot of MVC frameworks that's out there. If you want to pickup on MVC, just choose among the MVC frameworks - Groovy/Grails, C#/ASP.MVC, PHP/CakePHP, Ruby/Rails, etc. etc. again, stay away from hype and language/framework vs. language/framework debates. If you pick one you're comfortable with, the concepts transcend language and time. If your career moves you on to another language, you'll find MVC is 'almost' the same save for minor differences that is brought upon by the languages themselves.<p><i>Especially applicable for the number of JS MVC Frameworks popping up every 3 or so months.</i>
I'm trying to go deep in two things right now: Ruby and JavaScript. The frameworks and new popular languages don't matter to me right now, my goal is to become an expert in Ruby and JavaScript because I know I'll be able to transfer those skills to the next popular language when the industry changes. But just doing weekend tutorials on every new technology is not going to get you anywhere. Anyone can learn a little about a lot.<p>Point is, get really really good at one or two things and you'll be able to transfer easily. Doesn't matter what those one or two things are.
Technologies serve a specific purpose. The key is to understand the purpose, then you can understand why the technology was created, if you need to understand it, and if it is any good.<p>I suggest you find a "stack" (for want of a better word) and become comfortable with that and why it exists. Maybe this is the traditional RDBMS - Webserver - JS. But be surte you understand it, can deploy it from scratch, know where and how packages interact.<p>Then start extending that stack - maybe email integration.<p>You will get a feel for why technologies exist when you hit the limitations of the old ones - and the best way to do that is to package up the old ones in your head and suddenly you will get a new idea for improving it. THere is almost certainly a project on github for that but no matter - now you know you are at the edge of the art and can keep expanding.