How do you figure out what’s hot or not? How can you develop a gut feeling about trends and technologies (as a private person) without having to spend huge amounts for research agencies like Gartner, Forrester, g2 or IDC?
Here’s my approach when it comes to tech research.
Technology Radar
Honestly, I love the concept of Tech Radar. Initially established as the Thoughtworks Technology Radar in the context of technology consulting, Zalando’s Tech Radar extended the concept to support their engineering teams (sharing knowledge in a scalable, asynchronous way). Check out the Inventage Tech-Radar which brings the user experience to a whole new level.
Books
Books help immensely to understand the background - such as the emergence of certain trends and also the underlying principles.
There are so many books to read. Let me come up with a quick list of recent reads:
- Svyatoslav Kotusev, The Practice of Enterprise Architecture: A Modern Approach to Business and IT Alignment
- Hophe Gregor, Cloud Strategy: A Decision-based Approach to Successful Cloud Migration
- Goniwada, Shivakumar R, Cloud Native Architecture and Design: A Handbook for Modern Day Architecture and Design with Enterprise-Grade Examples
- Hohpe, Gregor, The Software Architect Elevator: Redefining the Architect’s Role in the Digital Enterprise
- Zimmermann, Olav, Patterns for Api Design
There are also some all-time classics, but this list might be due for another blogpost…
Awesome lists
Github Awesome lists are very good to get a quick entry point for a specific technology. Sindresorhus kicked off the whole thing and nowadays there are plenty of lists.
How about Apache Kafka? Or Kubernetes?
Even most of the links of this post have their list
Blogs and news sites
- Apache.org Projects List - skimming through their projects on a regular basis
- CNCF.org Projects - checking out whats incubating. Then checking out Github to see which company/dev community is behind
- Hacker News
Social Media
Already mentioned Github - in this context it could also be considered as a kind of ‘social media for hackers’. Trends, hot topics and all this stuff - in real time.
Twitter. Just to be following some special persons. Its fast. Most of the time you get updates on news two day before the stuff will be featured by the official news sites.
Other stuff (rarely done)
Preference is clearly on non-synchronous content (ability to skim it through quickly), so neither Podcasts nor any Videos will make it. Luckily chances are high to get hold of transcripts of this content as well.
Also not so convinced about newsletters. Most of the time Twitter and Github are faster and more neutral (newsletters can be considered as tools for marketing)