With software development constantly in flux, it has taken quite an effort to dial in my system for staying informed. "The right tool for the right job" is the name of the game.
I am a huge fan of digests/newsletters! There's just SO much information published every week/day/hour, and I am grateful that others are willing to dig through it all and publish what they think are the best parts. Some digests are sent daily, but I prefer the weekly ones.
Also, I use Google Inbox's Bundle feature to collect all of these digests, and hide them until a designated time the next day. I do wish the time of day was configurable, but 7am will do for now...
- FrontEnd Focus
- Collect UI - You'll need to click the
Newsletterlink in the top right. - UX Design Weekly
- The UI Animation Newsletter
- Muzli weekly digest
- Web Design Weekly
- Fullstack React
- The React Digest
- React Newsletter
- React Status
- React Native Newsletter
- The Smashing Email Newsletter – Smashing Magazine
- Friday Front-End
- JavaScript Weekly
- Mobile Web Weekly
- Node Weekly
- WebOps Weekly
- GraphQL Weekly - Newsletter about GraphQL, Apollo and more
- Developer Tips by Umar Hansa
- The Hacker News Newsletter
- Flipboard 10 for Today
- Flipboard Sunday Edition
- Flipboard Week in Review
- Medium Digest
- Quora Digest
- Pocket Hits
- Youtube (weekly email of subscriptions/recommendations)
I use Twitter for one thing: following developers. It is a great platform for following public discussions and seeing links/retweets of useful resources.
I don't want to miss any tweets, so I have Tweetmarker save my position in the timeline. When I open Tweetbot for Mac or Flamingo for Android, I am able to pick up from where I left off, not just from the top of the timeline. FOMO, no mo’!
When I do have time to check Twitter, I skim it. If a tweet looks like something worth digging in to, I Like it and keep moving. At the end of the day, following the "Inbox Zero" approach, I try to read through all of these Likes, un-Liking them as I go. It doesn't matter what Twitter rebrands the feature to, I'll always use it as a read-it-later system.
Developers are people, with non-developery things they'd like to talk about. This is a great use of Twitter, but does not fit with how I want to utilize it. Fortunately, Tweetbot's Mute Filters has my back! It hides all tweets with words like "Trump", "Hilary", "election", "religion", etc in them.
Sometimes, despite a person having great thoughts and tweets, they're just too chatty for me to handle in my system. So, I just Unfollow and rely on others to retweet the highlights.
I use the hell out of Github's Subscribe feature for Issues and Pull Requests, which sends me an email when someone responds in a thread. It helps me get a gauge for when a feature will land, and how it is being considered.
When I have a pain point with a project, I search its repo for an active Issue/PR and Subscribe. I also periodically check repos of projects I rely on to see if there are new, good threads to subscribe to.
Sometimes, when I really care about the activity of a repo, I temporarily Watch it. In doing so, I am auto-subscribed to all Issue/PR activity.
Back in the Google Reader days, I was an avid RSS user, slurping in 100+ posts/day. I treated it the way I treat Twitter today: as a reading list.
I suppose I still use Feedly as a reading list, but I follow significantly fewer blogs. I'd love to just be able to reduce this service into a single, weekly digest.
- Codrops | Useful resources and inspiration for creative minds
- CSS-Tricks
- Smashing Magazine – For Professional Web Designers and Developers
- Google Developers Blog
- David Walsh Blog - JavaScript Consultant
- Tutorialzine | Web Development Tutorials & Resources
- Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots
- Chromium Blog
- xkcd: Random Obsessions
- Signal v. Noise
- The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
- zen habits
- Cal Newport - Author of Deep Work, Study Hacks Blog
I use Pocket Casts because it is cross platform (including browser), syncs progress, and has a speed-up option. For speakers without strong accents, I enjoy listening at 1.5x speed.
When I get in the car to drive to work, I turn on my bluetooth receiver. Turning it on auto-launches Android Auto on my phone, which has Pocket Casts positioned prominently at the top. Pocket Casts is configured to play through all downloaded podcasts, so I just press Play, and I'm on my way.
- React Native Radio
- React30
- Javascript Jabber
- Front End Center
- JavaScript Air
- GraphQL Radio
- HTTP 203 Podcast
- Software Engineering Daily
- The Changelog with Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo
Occasionally, I take a "Youtube Lunch": instead of going out, I watch something while I eat.
Youtube's Watch Later list is really great for this. I am able to avoid any analysis paralysis on Youtube's landing page by just going straight to a list of videos I've already deemed worth watching. When I'm there, I let my energy level decide what to play. If I'm feeling productive and motivated, I watch a technical video (conference or meetup talk). If I'm feeling drained, I watch an entertaining, educational video (science or history), or I watch something inspirational (usually a TED talk).
If I can clearly understand the speaker, I again enjoy watching at 1.25-1.5x speed. This speedup feature is amazing! I even sometimes avoid watching live content for the speedup option later.
- These usually come from Twitter, Digests, and Blogs
- Google Chrome Developers
- More specifically, the Developer Diary series
- Vox
- TED-Ed
- Veritasium
- SmarterEveryDay
- CrashCourse
- AsapSCIENCE
- minutephysics
- Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
- Vsauce
I'm happy with this system. It isn't easy by any means--I spend at least an hour a day consuming content--but it has kept me sane, and well informed.
Do you have a system? I’d love to hear about it!