How I Stay Up To Date
Tags: productivity, javascript, webdev, career
Published: 2021-04-10 12:27:31

I've managed to stay in touch with what is happening in the React world, the Node.js world and also keep on updating my engineering management skills. So recently some colleagues asked me to share my sources.

## Learning New Skills Quickly

Whenever I want to learn a new topic, I try to find a hand full of domain experts – people who are really top notch in this field – and learn from them. Usually by following them on Twitter, reading their Blogs and subscribing to their newsletters. And then I practice. It's incredible how quickly you make progress when you have some direction from domain experts and put in time and effort to practice what you now know. Just 2 weeks of this make it possible for me to start having in depth conversations about the topic.

Oren Ellenbogen has described a very similar approach at a conference talk. I fully recommend watching this.

{% youtube 9edq00JwNzg %}

## Twitter

Right now my most important source of info is Twitter. Here I have a few people I'm following

React & Node.js

* [Kent C. Dodds](https://twitter.com/kentcdodds)
* [Ryan Florence](https://twitter.com/ryanflorence)
* [Sebastian McKenzie](https://twitter.com/sebmck)
* [Dan Abramov](https://twitter.com/dan_abramov)
* [Andrew Clark](https://twitter.com/acdlite)
* [Sophie Alpert](https://twitter.com/sophiebits)
* [Jamie Kyle](https://twitter.com/buildsghost)

Technical Excellence & Tech Entrepreneurship

* [Charity Majors](https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy)
* [Liz Fong-Jones](https://twitter.com/lizthegrey)
* [Guillermo Rauch](https://twitter.com/rauchg)
* [Monica Lent](https://twitter.com/monicalent)
* [Kent Beck](https://twitter.com/KentBeck)
* [Martin Fowler](https://twitter.com/martinfowler)
* [Julia Evans](https://twitter.com/b0rk)

## Newsletters

With my newsletters I like to have a mix of content from individuals who write their own blog posts and curators who link to many different blogs. Keeping updated with the content of an individual allows some consistency and I understand their references to previous content. Curators allow me to open my mind to new content continuously

[Kent C. Dodds](https://kentcdodds.com/) has a focus on testing & React. You can subscribe to his newsletter at the bottom of the page.

[SoftwareLeadWeekly](https://softwareleadweekly.com/) by Oren Ellenbogen is helping me stay up to date as a manager and tech leader. Oren also has a book, which I found ok but it didn't influence me too much. His mailing list contains info which is more geared towards managers, but I believe that any engineer profits from that knowledge.

[LeadDev](https://leaddev.com/) also has a great newsletter (at the bottom) focussed on all sorts of tech leadership topics. They also organise some wonderful (virtual) conferences which I previously attended.

[Stefan Judis](https://www.stefanjudis.com/newsletter/) has a very humble tone in his newsletter. He writes stuff which is just fun to follow and very relatable.

[X-Team](https://x-team.com/) has a curation of usually technical documents. What I find interesting is that they highlight blog posts as well as useful GitHub repositories.

## From Engineer to Manager

I've previously written about even more [resources which help with the transition to becoming an Engineering Manager](https://dev.to/johannes_scha/getting-into-engineering-management-useful-resources-to-start-thinking-like-a-manager-57gm)

Cover photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@scottsweb?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Scott Evans</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/s/photos/renew?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a>