Thursday, December 14, 2006

How to keep yourself updated?

"How do you keep yourself updated with latest tech-news/technology? " is one of the common questions among software developers. Considering that there are new tools/websites introduced every day, we need to spend atleast 1-2 hours everyday just to be informed about them.

My suggestions for keeping yourself updated will be
  • Read good blogs - This is the best way to keep yourself abreast about what is happening in the industry, since most of the blogs are written by end users after using a particular tool/website it gives a better idea than the manual found in the particular website.
  • Read websites aggregating latest tech news and nice tips - To begin with you might not know which is the best blog so go to site like techmeme, digg to get informed about the latest tech news. Also, make sure you read Lifehacker.com, it will improve your day to day life with computer much easier with tricks you have never heard before.
  • Use a Blog Reader - Make sure you have a good blog reader to automatically fetch posts from your favourite blogs/tech-news sites. Even though there are hundreds of blog readers, I recently started using Google Reader and I am loving it every minute. Since it is web based you can easily use it across multiple systems and it's from GOOGLE :).
  • Listen to Podcast - Most of us dont have enought time to spend browsing online. we spend valuable time in commute but podcasts make sure we use that time usefully. There are many sites like scotthanslemann minutes, dotnetrocks offering good podcasts on weekly basis. Download them to your i-pod and you will notice that your commute became more productive.
  • Learn with tutorial videos - Sometimes I hate reading books to learn something new. Try to see if there is any free tutorial videos available for the particular technology. Tutorial videos reduce your learning curve for a new technology. The other day I was looking for some tutorials for Asp.net Ajax . It was really nice to see so many videos on that subject which made it real easy on me to start learning something new.

Let me know if you have any other tips up your sleeves to keep yourself updated..

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