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Become a better developer with an efficient technical watch

Aurore Malherbes3 min read

Besides side projects, technical watch (reading articles, watching talks, listening to podcast) is the best way to discover new technologies, to learn useful technical tips, to improve your methodology and so on.

Technical Watch is like Devops: you have to be equipped to be efficient. The very first thing you should do to start is to install a tool like Pocket. With the app and the chrome extension you can stash and read articles everywhere.

pocket

Now, you have to find sources. Here are some examples, but feel free to ask around you what people are reading:

Then you should create your own routine. Book 10 minutes each day to source content. For instance, I do that during breakfast. If it takes less than 30 seconds to read, read it now, if it takes longer stash it in our favorite app. Next find a daily slot to read the articles you’ve selected. The 20 minutes in the subway are much more useful since I’ve started this routine!

It’s important to regenerate your sources often otherwise the number of interesting articles will drop dramatically.
Thus, every two months, look at the list of people you’re following on Twitter, and remove the one whom you haven’t read a tweet within the month.
If you haven’t found any interesting articles on Hackernews since 15 days, switch to Reddit.

Finally if you want to look deeper into a specific subject, books could be your best ally. That’s how Benjamin, the CTO of Theodo, learnt how to code in Ruby and that’s how I’m learning how to work effectively with legacy code.

And what about you? I would be glad to learn what your tips are to do efficient technical watch!