Tonight I went through Chris Coyier’s “How to Stay Up to Date with Web Technology” presentation, my first step in viewing all of Smashing Magazine’s “Talks to Help You Become a Better Front-end Engineer in 2013”.
To be honest, it wasn’t at all what I expected. I had been hoping that I would get a clear, concise set of daily, weekly, and monthly rituals to implement for the upcoming year. The closest thing that came to that were a list of useful weekly newsletters to subscribe to:
- web-design-weekly.com
- css-weekly.com
- sidebar.io
- javascriptweekly.com
- html5-weekly.com
- responsivedesignweekly.com
These were all listed under the subtext “Gimme something easy!”, and naturally there’s an understanding that goes along with such a sentiment that contradicts its original demand. I know this all too well given the myriad starred, yet unread, siderbar digests I have sitting in my inbox.
Chris continues on with two further subtexts “I don’t want to make bad decisions” and “I’m getting old”, both of which he responds to pretty swiftly with example questions of the much more relevant personal and contextual demands of whatever particular situation the asker of the question “How do I keep up with web tech?” finds themselves in.
Bottom-line: if you’re asking the question “How do I keep up?” Chris follows up with “Why do you ask?”, because ultimately the answer to the latter question is a lot more revealing.
So I ask myself: Why do I want to keep up with web tech? I guess it’s because I want to be knowledgable and well-versed in what’s going on in the web development world. Already as I type that, I’ve figured out a lot about myself. Turns out: I am well-versed in what’s going on, but that’s not what I really want. I want to be able to make things, not talk about them.
For the past year, I’ve gotten quite good at talking about web development. So good, that I might seem like I know what I’m doing. The problem, however, is that I haven’t been doing all that much. And as a result, I’m pretty bad at getting things done if I’m charged with a web development task. I’m easily distracted by my twitter feed. I’d rather talk the pros and cons of some newly hyped library or even mangle a project trying to hastily implement some new framework, when I really should be sitting down and crunching through my code, reading docs, and deepening my practice.
I’m sort of a poser.
So, obviously, this needs to end. Now. It’s why I don’t have any code samples; it’s why I will be forever a fast-talking generalist. It’s not that I shouldn’t learn new things; it’s rather that there are a lot of things for me to learn by doing right now, and I’ll never learn them if I keep raking up all the nonsense that washes up on the infinitely wide web development news beaches.
I will make bad decisions. I will make silly newb mistakes. But I will have projects to show for it, and I will learn along the way. And that will be infinitely more productive.
In response to this revelation, I’ve made myself a little flowchart to keep myself on task as I move through this year. I’ve included it below:
ashley stands up 