This week I am in Zeist, The Netherlands at the SDC conference. This morning I did a talk on “Drinking from the Fire Hose” which included a discussion on how I keep up with technology. A couple of key think I shared in this session were:
- The further you are from the fire hose of technology, the easier it is to notice what tech dies on the vine.
- Watching smart people online can help you keep up with a technology until you reach the ‘tipping point’ to adopt or ignore it.
In response to watching smart people online, I was asked to mention which RSS Feeds and Twitter accounts I follow. I separate the RSS feeds I follow into two different types: daily blogs that post often (e.g. Engadget) and smart people who I need to hear when they only blog once a month. For the first group I use iGoogle to keep panes of headlines so I can quickly scan the headlines for things I am interested in, but I don’t need to keep up. Here are some of those blogs:
For the second group, I use Google Reader (via an iGoogle widget to show new posts quickly). Some of the blogs in this group include:
This is just a taste of who I read, but you can get a sense of it. Lastly, on Twitter I follow about 275 people (more than I remembered). Here are some of the folks that I love listening to (even though we don’t agree on much):
- @jeffwilcox
- @unclebobmartin
- @fallenprogrammr
- @pprovost
- @TessFerrandez
- @nkohari
- @brianrandell
- @dbelcham
- @martinfowler
- @lazycoder
The point of the talk was to listen to people outside of your technology to broaden your exposure to new technologies.
