Tips and tricks for keeping up-to-date

These days a lot of people in the software business, including myself, do (or should do) some work to keep up with technologies, and what experiences others have. This includes quite a bit of reading both on misc websites and blogs. This can at times feel like quite a bit of work, because technologies that might be relevant tends to come in bundles, and if you wish to follow the relevant blogs it may be quite a few which means new updates every day.

Once in a while I have been reflecting on how to do get around this in an effective way, so it wont kill me before I reach 40. One of the best things I did for myself was to use google reader to follow blogs through their RSS feeds, and then have it as my startup page in my browser. This way I see the feed several times a day, and I am able to sort the feeds on the fly, and mark some of them as "to be read later". Once I got my Android phone this god even better, because now I can check it while on the train as well.

This solves half of the problem in the sence that it does not help with the webpages I stumble upon that I want to read, but dont have time for right at that time, because I was actually researching something different. Here Scott Hanselman blogged about "two must-have tools for a more readable web" that I have started using, and I am already loving it after less than a week of use. In short to sum up it gives you a place to save links that you wish to read later, and gives you an option to convert them to a simple format, if the page for some reason is hard to read.

The last thing that I have up my sleeve is my Kindle. I am not trying to sell the product as such, but the idea of something like it at least. A lot of material is published as PDF's and I absolutely hate reading long documents in front of my computer. Here the Kindle helps out, and on top of that it is amazing to be able to have a ton of books reduced to a small device that you can bring to the beach or whereever you relax.