Ask HN: As a Full stack developer how do you keep up with all the technologies

For example, if you understand event driven workflows, you'll be able to pick up react/flux, desktop UI drivers, and video game addons. If you understand continuations (and the various ways to abstract away continuations), you can grok most of Javascript (and by extension, Node.js). If you understand pointers, you'll be able to follow C (though I'd also recommend learning some Assembly as well to really understand C). Pattern matching will get you Haskell and Erlang. And if you can use Google well, everything else is a search away.

Now it is important to note that theory will never make you an immediate expert at every language and platform. However, it does let you bootstrap yourself into a language or framework quickly enough that outsiders will hardly be able to tell the difference.

I've found that once I understand the flow of a program, and ideally the theory driving that flow as well, the syntax required to express the changes you want to make to the flow is merely a few Google searches away.

Another thing to note, if you bounce around like this, you will never get true mastery over a particular language or framework. This is OK for more than 80% of the work you do, but you will end up picking up more information about one language over another - of one framework over another - simply to complete your work. Having this depth of knowledge is not even remotely a bad thing, so long as you keep sight of the bigger picture: don't let the quirks of one language or framework constrain your thinking for all languages.

http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/

I think this is a bit unfair. I find myself rapidly getting to the point of expertise where other people start asking me questions, just because I didn't have to spend time going from "dumb newbie" to "intermediate"--but being able to start at "intermediate" because of the built-up knowledge of everything in my back pocket. Part of it's also that I recognize that technical mastery is mostly just being able to Google faster and better than the next guy, but still.

We're short a letter in English for what I really mean, but there are I-shaped people and T-shaped people--what about U-shaped people? Building on multiple sources of knowledge to join them at the top? =)

When you do it long enough, you get a really good sense of the structure of programs. Then, it's just a matter of fitting in the best technologies of the time into the 'architecture'.

The full stack is just data storage, data transfer, processing, user interface, system structure, tools, and processes. When you do it long enough, you get a good, general understanding of all of these pieces.

When I take on a new project, I do the following:

1. learn about all the 'current' technologies

2. write simple apps (full stack) in each of them

3. decide on which are best (sometimes I make mistakes, often I use 'old' stuff)

4. cram a bit

5. write a somewhat more complex app

6. learn the rest, as I go

If you're going to be a developer for more than a handful of years, you're going to need to be prepared to retrain yourself on new things every few years.