The Key to Staying Ahead In Tech and Keeping Your Sanity: Delivering Value Over Hype in Your Product.
# Introduction
Keeping up with technology in today’s fast-paced, AI-driven industry is hard.
With new tools emerging every day across countless communication channels, staying up-to-date can be overwhelming. Marketing is about shaping perceptions, and in technology, people and companies often chase trends to gain attention and drive revenue. It took me years of working as a tech lead in startups to figure this out:
Deliver impact over hype.
# How to Keep Up
For software engineers, staying up-to-date is essential in today’s competitive industry.
Fortunately, doing so is easy to do. Most of the significant updates are announced on the big social media apps like Reddit, X, and now Bluesky too. Add to that internal communication channels such as Slack, Discord, and chances are no piece of news will miss you.
So if you’re not doing it yet, my top recommendation for new and experienced developers alike is one or a combination of:
- Spend 15 minutes every day scroll through the top posts of your favorite social media, as long as you avoid doom-scrolling. For me, this is Reddit and Bluesky.
- Subscribe to newsletters that aggregate news for you. For example: This Week In React, Next.js Weekly, Remix Newsletter.
- Set up an RSS reader. Google for “Reddit <insert topic here> blogs to follow” if you don’t know where to start.
# The Importance of Staying Informed
Do not consume every single new piece of content that comes your way.
In fact, if you do, you are wasting your energy. Awareness is key; complete understanding is not. Instead of consuming all the information on the spot, write notes with short remarks or AI summaries and save links. Over time, you will build up an invaluable treasury of knowledge.
Finding a solution to a novel problem on the spot can be surprisingly difficult, so it’s best to prepare the answer beforehand. Feed your subconscious the data and let it create connections for you when needed.
As of the time I’m writing this, I currently have curated around 700 pieces of content/tools in my Notion workspace. Whenever I start a new project, I can ask Notion AI to list me all the relevant notes, or quickly skim through them myself. Before I have even started the work, I already have everything I need.
Save now, consume later, set yourself up for success.
# What Truly Matters
A huge disparity exists in the amount of new tools and things we really need.
With new tools and frameworks, there’s often a gap between innovation and proven business value. New technologies talk about improving the web but cannot show how they’ll impact businesses, projects, or end-users. This lack of clear business value is one reason there is no strong pull towards adopting them in new applications and startups.
Stick to time-tested solutions over new tech.
Tanner Linsley recently created a poll on Bluesky about the data-fetching methods developers use in applications they get paid for. The results showed that an overwhelming majority uses client-side rendering. Despite this, balance is important. Without innovation we cannot grow as engineers, as companies, as people, and without adoption, innovation does not exist.
Balance value with innovation.
# Conclusion
Having said all of that, I’m the kind of person who loves new tools to play with and things to learn. Given I cannot get rid of this addiction, I figured I may as well share my findings and thoughts with others. If you’re interested in getting a brief e-mail with my insights about tech and news that truly matter in the startup world, my newsletter may be for you.
Either that or for the occasional parrot picture, that’s also a valid reason I can get behind.
# Further reading
- 📝 Another poll by Tanner Linsley asking for motivation behind using Next.js + React Server Components
- 📝 My other article about cultivating knowledge and efficient problem solving
- 🔨 My Notion template that I use to organize all my work and knowledge
