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Cal Evans Director of PCE |
| Cal Evans is the Director of the PHP Center for Expertise at Ibuildings. He has been involved in IT development and management for the past 26 years and for the past 9 has developed primarily in PHP and MySQL. Cal is the author of a book and many articles on PHP development and can regularly be seen speaking at PHP conferences around the world. Cal blogs regularly at http://blog.calevans.com |
Wednesday, August 19. 2009Staying Current
Ray Kurzweil, in his book "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology" talks about the increasing pace of change in technology. Anyone who is a manager in an IT department doesn't need Mr. Kurzweil to explain this to them. IT managers live with the reality that they must not only keep up with new technologies that affect their departments but keep up with changes within the technologies they currently use. To bring it home, managers of PHP development teams have to keep up with the changes that happened in PHP 5.3 recently as well as new services from Amazon and Google while trying to fit the forward looking things like Google Wave and PubSubHubBub in there as well. With all of this information being thrown at managers these days, how are you supposed to keep up?
The simple answer is: let others do it for you. There are two ways to do that. Find web based resources that filter and summarize technology blogsThe key to this is that it can't be an automated filter. You need to find a site with a person or several people behind it that you trust to give you the important stories. Sites like Slashdot.org used to be good at this but even they have devolved. When it comes to PHP two sites, closely linked, come to mind. The first is phpdeveloper.org. Operated by Chris (Enygma) Cornutt, phpdeveloper.org is a regular site for most PHP developers. Chris is the human filter behind phpdeveloper.org. Every article passes by him and if found newsworthy, he will summarize it and give you a relevant quote and the necessary links. Chris knows PHP inside and out and this is a terrific resource. The second human filtered site is Zend's DevZone. DevZone is being run by Eli White and even though he regularly syndicates phpdeveloper.org's content, there is enough new content there to make it worth your while to follow. Both of these sites can be scanned in under 2 minutes each and spending 4-5 minutes each day catching up with them will keep your finger on the pulse of PHP and the PHP community. Find audio resources to fill your down timeThe US Census Bureau estimates that in the US, workers commute an average of 24 minutes each way to get to work. That's 48 minutes a day that is spent idling that you can recover and use to your benefit. These days there are podcasts for every conceivable topic. Whether you want to stay current on management techniques or future-proof your career with forward looking technology podcasts, there is a podcast for you. As with blogs, books, TV shows and any other entertainment medium, you will have to try a few podcasts out before you can find the right ones for you. Currently for PHP, the site phppodcasts.com aggregates PHP related podcasts. Technology podcasts on the other hand are spread across the web. The best all-in-one resource for finding them is still iTunes. Whether your commute is down the stairs or across town, you have unintentional downtime that you can use to your advantage. The problem of the increasing pace of change is only going to get worse. As IT managers, we can either accept this or learn to cope with the ramifications, or we can keep feeling the increasing pressure to keep up until we melt down. Given how hard it is to find good IT managers, I'm sure your management would appreciate you choosing the former. Share         Comments
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Nice article. I find that the first (summarize and filter) is the best way to keep up... All those blogs, news sites etc etc (IMHO ibuildings included) is just too many to keep up... Try and find the ones that mention your own interests and follow that.
My personal PHP list of blogs / sites: - phpdeveloper.org - codeutopia (http://www.codeutopia.net/) a personal blog, with GREAT articles - Planet PHP (http://www.planet-php.net/) excellent summarization. The whole audio-thing keeps me baffled... I just can't seem to be able to sit down and listen to technology podcasts... It's like i can't skip to the interesting parts or even scan through it's contents to see if it's interesting at all  I just use my phone with an RSS reader to keep up... works brilliantly and is available everywhere
While this is a bit late, I thought I'd chime in here. Another way to stay abreast of the latest trends is user groups and conferences (or unconferences in many cities too). This isn't as 'fast' a way as scanning RSS headlines and such. However, over the course of a few hours, you can often find other people who've hit the same snags as you and learn how they solved the problem. You'll also be exposed to people presenting in-depth information on some of the latest trends. You'll get much more than a headline and summary, and will be able to ask questions during and after the event.
While I understand not everyone has time for events like that on a regular basis, making a point to hit some local user groups can keep you ahead of the curve in many instances. |
