Favorite Resources for Keeping up to Date in the Industry 2024


Working in an industry that moves as fast as software requires constant work to coninue 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.

Newletters

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/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 3rd 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 artcles/discussions to dive into.

Books

Some favorite software/career reads this year:

Fierce Conversations by Susan Scot

Are Your Lights On? by Donald C Gause and Gerald M Weinberg

How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg

Rule of the Robots by Marin Ford

Righting Software by Juval Löwy

Meetups

There are a few local tech-related meetings I attend. It’s a great way to meet with other folks and provides a nice platform for getting into random discussions and seeing parts of the software world I’m not exposed it. It really helps see the larger picture!

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