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Ask HN: How Do Developers Stay Up to Date Without Being on Twitter All Day?

4 points by jerawaj740 ↗ HN
I feel like a lot of the best tech updates, new libraries, tool releases, smart engineering insights, show up first in random Twitter replies or buried threads. I don’t want to spend my whole day refreshing Twitter just to stay informed, but I also don’t want to miss important stuff. How do you keep up with tech as a developer without being glued to Twitter?

9 comments

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gooodvibes
I wonder if there's some kind of online board or forum where people post about tech...

Also, have you tried working instead of twitter? Learning instead of twitter? Just no twitter instead of twitter? Whatever useful thing you're telling yourself that you get from it, good chance that you're wrong and you can do without it completely instead of needing to replace it in some way.

andsoitis
embrace JOMO, the joy of missing out.

you don't need up-to-the-minute or even up-to-the-month updates. In fact, it can make you miss the forest forest for the trees.

stop50
Some trusted IT related newssites and a few youtubechannels(subscribed via rss).
skydhash
My account on Twitter is still there (I like the handle). But I've not connected in months (close to be a year). And before that I spend years connecting only in private windows (so that I disconnect as soon as I'm done and all the cookies vanish). Instead I spend time in here, or lurk in some reddit forums (I deleted my account there). But mostly I hack in some code to learn about stuff (lately it's been the subsonic protocol and Open Publication Distribution System, trying to create some good clients)

Here gives me enough news about what notable and I know where to find info for niche communities. But these days, it seems that I'm learning old tech most rather than the newish thing.

viraptor
If you want to say up to date at a slower pace, find a good aggregator to check from time to time. Maybe it's HN, maybe daily.dev, sdtimes (they have a podcast), infoq, or fireship.

But in reality - how much of this do you need? I stay up to date because it brings me joy of learning. If it's more work than fun, consider how much of the new information you actually use day to day. Would you lose anything if you took 1 day every month or two to read through top 10 articles from that period? For most devs, I would bet they almost never get to use the things they learned in the last few weeks.

vinhnx
One source of aggregator that I find useful is to subscribe to newsletter to a topic of your interested. Optionally choose weekly option to avoid daily email overloaded. Twitter is very good to keep up with latest trend and discussions, make sure to follow and trim following list to suits your interests best. Recent Twitter's algorithm changes seems make it less focused than before, but it still good. Otherwise, bookmark our own https://news.ycombinator.com/news and pin it to position 0 of the pinned list, so that everytime or everyday you open the browser, HN is default.
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l1ng0
In 40 years of programming I never used Twitter to keep up to date.

Reddit, Hacker News, online manuals, blogs , online magazines , offline manuals (back in the day), SDK documentation, Devdocs, Colleagues and friends, and Wikipedia.