Have you been learning from your team?
Although HN is nice to find about interesting things, there's nothing that can give me more experience than focusing on my team's goals. Focusing on execution is the most important and most translatable skillset you can have besides interviewing.
Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?
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Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?
#12Tech in general is a fast moving target. Don't try to master everything all at once. Just learn what you need, or what interests you and then on to the next thing. There is no "done".
I think there has been an explosion in potential distractions the last couple of years though. Everywhere you look, new frameworks, platforms and languages, as far as the eye can see. So much shiny stuff. And it just keeps coming. (I do think something has changed in like just the last five years or so. Github has been an important part of it, I think.)
Does this change also appear in usage numbers, is real large scale use in the industry much more divided among tools since before 5 years ago ?
Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?
#13I can see how this would happen, so I doubt you are alone. There's so much stuff and s o little time to consume it. My browser tabs and pocket account seem to grow and grow and I seem to spend as much time organizing and moving information as I do actually consuming it. I have trained myself as I've gotten older to just let some of it go. Not everything has to be seen.
I think this is one of the (probably many) reasons feed readers failed and chat came to beat email: the feeling of something incomplete. I had to force myself to ignore unread counts to stop myself from going crazy, but Twitter, HN, Reddit, etc. did away with outward signs that there were things unread, and that's a good start.
Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?
#14Take a break.
Try cutting the cord for a few days. It's refreshing.
Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?
#15I'm a Sysadmin on the east coast & I feel completely wrecked every time I read the comments here. The level of brain power & swell here is beyond me. Some of you can be a little brash, though. I wonder if it's just you guys are all on a different level, cognitively, are taking drugs, or what. But the precision at which some of you respond to comments, clarify things and/or just rip apart content, is fascinating.
Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?
#16 Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.
Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.
Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?
#17Yeah there is a lot out there. I've been doing this for a while and tech changes all the time. Don't worry about not being an expert at everything, enjoy that there a lot to learn.
I don't worry too much about it, as long as what I'm building works and can be maintained I'm happy.
The good news about tech changing all the time is if you wait there will be some new language or framework so you didn't waste your time learning something obsolete !
"An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less till they know everything about nothing" - from a Murphy's laws on technology poster..
Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?
#18No, because you can't expect to learn and use every new technology -
sometimes, it's better to know "proven but boring" than "new but broken"!
I appreciate more the insightful conversations than view a link to the latest JavaScript framework.
Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?
#19I feel this way about frontend technologies that people talk about, but I concluded a long time ago that trying to keep up with the latest churn in that space is pointless. I have a few technologies which are stable and work well for what I need, so I focus on keeping up with that. Every time I've tried to chase the latest and greatest frontend fad it usually turned out it was an immature reinvention of a wheel someone else already built better.
Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?
#20You have to accept a lot of it is noise, or effectively noise.
Some of it is wrong, some of it will never be relevant to you, some of it could relevant to you but not knowing it will never hurt you. Some of it could possibly be relevant but will be obsolete or out of date by the time you get around to using it. Some of it is nonsubstantive self-promotion. Just focus on some area you want to improve on at a given time and do it. Read what you want to read and have time to read and ignore the rest.
Just because someone puts up a nice-looking blog post with some information doesn't mean they're right, or better than you. Not that it matters if they're better than you. You could be in the top 10% and that still leaves hundreds of thousands who are better than you.
That's assuming there's some pure linear scale of developer quality anyway, which there isn't. People are fingerprints, not points on a linear scale.