The web development industry feels like a constant game of catch-up – evolving and growing daily due to the many needed solutions.
In this space, you sleep and wake up, and you’ll miss the release of a new JavaScript library, a new strategy to approach APIs or a new state management library.
And it wouldn’t be nice that you are ignorant of the most mundane trends, new terms, or new tools; it wouldn’t go down well with your image as a web developer when these things come up as questions in a job interview or a client asks you a question about them.
But then, if you spend all your time catching up and being vigilant on the latest news and blogs, you have no time to code.
So how do you spend your time wisely, balancing coding, learning, and keeping up to date with trends?
Here are 8 legit ways to stay up to date on the recent web development trends and news.
1. Podcasts
Listening to podcasts is an excellent way to stay informed without breaking your eyes.
You can be coding and listening to your favorite web technology podcast on your work desk, or you can drive and do the same.
Podcasts are an efficient way for any skilled person to keep themselves updated because they don’t interfere with your productive time.
You can listen to the podcaster speaking while working n your current project.
Here is a list of the top 10 podcasts for web developers.
2. Community Membership
There’s no better way to learn than to learn from the people around you.
Newbie developers are always advised to join web development communities in their location and be active members so they can learn from others.
Being an active community member can also benefit any developer, regardless of your level.
In a community, you learn from people who are more knowledgeable than you; likewise, other people learn from you.
Most times, updates about new trends and the latest releases are discussed.
And other times, a physical or virtual event is hosted where knowledgeable people speak on their areas of specialization.
These are quality times to learn and update yourself on these topics.
3. Following Trends
This method will be much more helpful to your career if you follow and activate trend notifications for only the web development topics related to your area of specialization.
Let’s say you are a developer who works mostly on the MERN stack.
It will be easier to follow trends on only the topics MongoDB, Express, Reactjs, and Node.js, than following trends on all the web development topics.
You will find yourself in an endless cycle of scrolling through the news, tutorial websites, and youtube consuming resources – leaving you with little to no time to code and be productive.
4. Blogs and YouTube channels
Blogs are also good platforms to keep yourself updated.
It’s good to approach this with caution by getting an RSS feed and subscribing to the RSS feed of your favorite blogs.
So that you can easily check out their latest posts while you have leisure time.
Some blogs worth noting are:
You can use any RSS feed reader, but I recommend Feedly or Inoreader.
There are good YouTube channels you can subscribe to and watch their videos whenever the time for consuming resources comes up.
It would help if you also were careful here because it’s very easy to get drawn into wasting time on YouTube watching videos.
Some good web development YouTube channels include:
- Traversy media
- Javascript mastery
- Code commerce
- Easy tutorials
- Academind.
5. Twitter
Twitter is a microblogging platform that allows people to post short messages(tweets); containing whatever they want to talk about.
For this platform to be useful to you as a web developer, you must follow thought leaders thinking and tweeting about web development.
Their tweets are dedicated to educating and informing other developers on this platform.
6. Subreddits
Reddit is a content-sharing community that consists of sub-topic communities called subreddits.
Some people nicknamed Reddit the front page of the internet, and the Subreddit is a nice place to get the latest updates on a specific topic of your choice.
On Reddit, after signing up, proceed to unsubscribe from the default subreddits and subscribe to active subreddits relevant to your area of specialization.
You can join subreddits around programming languages like Javascript, frameworks like React and Vue, or general topics like web development.
The more you keep it limited to your area of specialization, the more you can focus on what matters to you and use your time effectively.
Other similar platforms include:
7. Quora
This platform was originally a question-and-answer platform where you ask questions and get answers from industrial experts.
But recently, the platform now has other features like spaces that make it mirror platforms like Reddit.
Quora spaces are dedicated to individual topics, and people can ask questions within the space, answer questions and at the same time post their contents.
You can follow the relevant spaces and also follow relevant topics.
Quora’s algorithm takes notes and shows you more related questions, sending you a daily digest of top questions about these topics.
You can learn a lot from answers dropped by top influencers for the questions asked.
Conclusion
Ultimately, it boils down to your individual preferences and the factors you want to guide your decision.
Each framework has special types of projects that perform best when used, so you need to figure out what type of project you want to build and what it will take.
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Till we meet again on another article,
Happy Coding!
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