Keeping up

This is the first of a series of articles geared towards explaining how I work, and what you don't get to see about me during the hiring process. These are productivity shortcuts and techniques that I've adopted over the years that allow me to justify my claim that my time is highly efficient and productive.

The list below is a current view of all the RSS feeds that I currently have in my reader of choice (the desktop app Klipfolio, which is powerful, lightweight, and incredibly reliable). I've been using Klipfolio and a lot of these feeds for over 3 years now, and they have served me well.

• Slashdot
  I use it mainly for reading the comments, as the news takes a little while to get posted on the site by the curators. The users of the site are often knowledgeable and humorous.
  
• TEDTalks (video)
  This should require no introduction. I discovered it a few years ago and combed through and watched all the videos that interested me, and have since combed through the videos as they get added to the site.
  
• Hacker News (Ycombinator)
  This is my main source of information related to my programming and entrepreneurial activities. The stories and great and get to me before any other source. The comments are generally good, but I don't really read them as I read the articles long before the comments start to appear on the site. Also, the links go directly to the article and not to the site itself, so I manually go back to the site to read comments if I think that the article needed further elaboration.
  
• The Economist
  I don't read it as often as I used to, but the Economist does have some of the best written articles out there.
  
• GlobalPost
  The GlobalPost also has some very well written articles, but again, I don't have the time these days to go through them unless they are really of interest to me.
  
• optics.org research channel
  They specialize in optics, naturally, but they do feature a unique slant on the news stories. For instance, you might read an article about the full-body scans and the public outcry and media fanfare in other feeds or through other media, but from optics.org you get the perspective of the technology itself: what imaging techniques and apparatus are used, and other technical details you would not find elsewhere.
  
• Core77
  It is a good source of web development news.
  
• Smashing Magazine
  This one is mostly targeted at web "designers," but does feature occasional articles geared towards web developers. It is a little skewed towards introductory-level techniques, but if you find yourself in that boat (as I often do), it offers a good introduction and features some good out-bound links.
  
• Yanko Design
  This one is mostly to look at design inspiration, as most of their features don't exist (and probably can't exist). It offers a good perspective on UI though, as a lot of the designs feature unique views for interacting with objects.
  
• Six Revisions
  You find more in-depth articles here than Smashing Magazine, and it is a bit more skewed towards web development than web design.
  
• QuirksBlog
  It is always good to keep up with his research and tinkering.
  
• ReadWriteWeb
  This one is a fairly recent addition to my feeds. It features a lot of very current work in real-time uses of the web. You would find information about XMPP, node, and other technologies geared towards providing interactivity and presence in real-time across the web using existing protocols and technology.
  
• WebWorkerDaily
  GigaOm - I purchased the annual subscription, mainly for their work with inspecting the current state of mobile technology, but their articles are generally good.
  
• GigaOM Pro
  See above
  
• myNoSQL
  This is the latest addition to my feeds. I just couldn't keep up with the noSQL trend as there are so many different solutions out there. Each has its little niche and this site tracks the various goings-on in this rapidly emerging field.
  
• xkcd.com
  You need to read this every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
  
• Dictionary.com Word of the Day
  I sometimes try to use the WotD, but I mostly find myself dismissing them as too obscure.
  
• Mandership
  If you have an interest in design or interactivity, you need to read this blog. I've read every single article and I find them all extremely well-written and thought-provoking.
  
• PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news
  This last one is usually the one with the most articles every day, and some of them are not as well-written as others. However, from a research perspective, it usually has the broadest breadth of information, and you would easily be able to find the journal article in question and read through it if you so wished. I use it generally to catch a glimpse of the state of various emerging technology from bio-tech and engineering.
  

So you see, I comb through a tonne of information on a daily basis. I find that I am well-informed, usually within a day of some emerging event or trend. I go through all of these feeds religiously, every day, and have developed the ability to scan through a lot to identify trends on my own as well. You can watch a story progress from one site to another and be able to judge the general level of activity around it. For instance, if twitter or gmail went down for a little while, you would notice it come up in Hacker News with something like "Is this service down for anyone else?" followed through with a bunch of blogs taking up the story and proclaiming them as being down. You would then see it happen again when the service came back up, and people would try and figure out what happened and what to do in the meantime. After all of it is done, within a day, you would see post-mortem analyses by various blogs, and perhaps an official story making its way around as well.

Keeping up and watching trends like noSQL emerge from nowhere and take over also helps to keep me interested in my field of choice. I am actively trying to integrate these technologies into my work, but until the opportunity presents itself, I would not jump in without a reason to do so. In the meantime, I spent about a year reading up on map/reduce and learning about the differences in the approaches that BigTable, Hadoop, MongoDB and CouchDB all take (to choose a very small sample). It is of great interest to me as a long-time user of SQL and having generated many crazy and complicated queries over the years. Some things are just not meant for SQL, though I suspect I will always be using both one SQL solution combined with a noSQL solution.

I feel that my efforts in staying current with this rapidly changing landscape makes me invaluable in helping with evaluations, planning, and coding using cutting-edge techniques. I am not afraid to delve into anything, and always make a point of checking out a site's source code (putting it through jsbeautifier if necessary). I like to incorporate techniques that I see being used in the wild, and I always make sure to recreate, not steal. It is for the purpose of learning, after all.