Working in an industry that moves as fast as software requires constant work to continue to be "in the know." Here are the resources I've enjoyed this year!
Slack
Rand's Leadership Slack. I initially found this slack while reading The Staff Engineer's Path by Tanya Reilly. It's a large community full of very smart people and there are so many wonderful insights to learn all over that slack.
Gophers is a golang focused slack for all things golang. It can be a bit dry at times, but it's a great place for very specific golang questions and topics.
YouTube
I'll have to come back later with a full post just on my favorite YouTube channels and talks. So many conferences post videos on there for free.
Newsletters
Golang Weekly is one of my absolute favorites. As implied, it's a weekly newsletter that highlights the newest and greatest Go features and blogs and highlights interesting tools and projects.
Pointer is a great collection of blogs and thought pieces written about software by software professionals. The topics range from management and process topics to case studies on certain tools and migrations.
Siliconflorist is a Portland, OR based tech newsletter that focuses on the local tech scene. It doesn't always touch my world very closely, but it's fun to follow the different news items on there to find parts of the tech scene that work very differently than my own.
ByteByteGo has a free newsletter that delivers information in a nice, digestible format. The newsletter is basically a way to get folks to use the paid services, but for a quick refresh in topics, it's great.
General — if you work with a third-party tool or library and they offer a newsletter, subscribe! Sometimes they release very useful features that you wouldn't always know about.
Social Media
Reddit and HackerNews are probably my biggest "social media" sources for software topics. The range of topics covered by either site is large, but it's pretty easy to scan headlines and decide which articles and discussions to dive into.
Books
Some favorite software and career reads this year:
- Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott
- Are Your Lights On? by Donald C. Gause and Gerald M. Weinberg
- How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg