How to keep updated with the JavaScript ecosystem?

Many people asked me how I keep updated with all the new JavaScript stuffs, how I know what to learn and where I find information. I found that this questions are common between people starting to learn how to code, Frontend or JavaScript. People starting in the industry.

That’s why I want to share how you can learn what to learn and where you can find information.

Originally published at https://sdx.im/articles/how-to-keep-updated-with-the-javascript-ecosystem

Find information

There’s a lot of places to find information. I found there are some places I always visit to get more info.

Mozilla Developer Network

Also known as MDN. This site is the documentation of web technologies. If you want to read about a HTML tag, a CSS attribute or a any JS related thing you must go there.

CanIUse

A really nice place to check the support of a feature in multiple browsers. It also gives you information about the usage of that browser (personal recommendation: if a browser doesn’t have more than 5% of usage don’t support it)

Specific documentations

Usually you use only a certain technologies, your personal stack. always check the documentation of that technologies to learn more, usually they have a blog, twitter accounts, a Github organization, etc. you can use to get more knowledge.

Awesome lists

Awesome is an idea started by sindresorhus. They are list of useful links about any technology. The main list (linked in the title) is a list of other awesome lists like awesome-javascript, awesome-react, awesome-redux, and more. This lists are really useful to find libraries, articles, talks, videos, etc. etc. about any specific technology.

Follow developers

Almost every developer have a Twitter account and they share a lot of interesting projects they’re working on or follow. And most important, they share ideas and have discussions you can read to learn a lot.

Because of that I created a Twitter List with many people, and follow them.

https://twitter.com/sergiodxa/lists/developers-designers

☝️ That’s the list, I always have a column in Tweetdeck with that list open. Try following that list of some members. They’re really awesome.

Read a lot

I’m always reading about the technologies I’m interested.

Medium

Medium it’s a great place to read, personally I like to follow tags which let me get articles from many authors and publications. The tags I follow are

I also follow some folks and publications like:

Engineering blogs

Many startups have engineering related blogs. In this kind of blogs they tell why they choose their stack or introduce technologies they create. Some of the publications I listed above are engineering blogs like the Slack Platform Blog, WalmartLabs and one of my favorites Netflix TechBlog. Other blogs:

Dev.to

Dev.to is a developer oriented community and blogging platform. It’s similar to Medium but only for development articles. Here you can follow tags or people and read a lot of articles and opinions about technology and development.

Personal blogs

I used to read a lot personal blogs, I still follow and read some blogs like PonyFoo or 2ality. Most of them migrated to Medium or dev.to meaning you can get more articles there.

Development blogs

Aside of Medium and Dev.to there are more blogs with many authors like CSSTricks, Codrops, Treehouse Blog, The npm Blog, The GitHub Blog, SurviveJS, Smashing Magazine, Scotch, React blog or Mozilla Hacks.

EchoJS

EchoJS is a website with the same idea of HackerNews, anyone can post interesting links, the only rules are they need to be JS related and in english. You can follow his Twitter account, access the website or follow the RSS feed to get all the links shared.

I found this site to be one of my biggest sources of links and articles about JS and related technologies. Instead of following a lot of blogs you can have a single curated list of articles.

Particularly the JS subreddit, and other specific subreddit like React, Frontend, React Native, Redux, GraphQL, etc. It’s the same idea as EchoJS, a curated feed of links.

Watch talks

I mentioned talks many times above. Watch talks and conferences about JS, the community is huge and we have many conferences about JS. The JSConf, alongside the country specific JSConf always have amazing talks.

Not only watch the talks in Youtube assist to them! There’re JSConf in many countries like JSConf AR, JSConf UY, JSConf CO, JSConf US, JSConf EU and more! And not only JSConf, NodeConf, NodeSummit, ReactConf, ▲ZEIT Day, etc.

Assist to meetups

Usually conferences are yearly. And only in capital cities. But meetups about any technology can be monthly, assist to meetups. A lot of cities have meetups and if your city doesn’t have one you can start it! Bring other developers and start doing meetups in your city.

Participate in communities

There exists many communities, they usually have a free Slack team you can join. ▲ZEIT community, ElmLang community, Reactiflux (react, RN, redux, GraphQL, Jest, Relay, etc.) community and more. Many development communities have their own Slacks, Discord or Gitter chats you can join.

Start participating can help you talk to the people who created the libraries and frameworks you use and with others in your same position.

Found useful Youtube channels

In Youtube exists a lot of channels, and some of them are related to development. Some cool channels you can follow are FunFunFunction, Facebook Developers, Netflix UI Engineering, Google Developers and node.js.

Many of them upload conferences videos, but other like FunFunFunction or Netflix UI Engineering upload videos specific for Youtube that are useful to learn more or watch different opinions about development.

Follow (and participate) in Github repositories

There’re many Github repositories you can follow and participate, that will let you know about the future of technologies you use daily. You can even participate sending Pull Requests, report or find bugs (and hopefully solutions to bugs) in their issues, they are awesome places to get more insights about frameworks or libraries you use.

Conclusion

There’re many ways to keep updated with technologies. Remember, development (and specially JavaScript and Frontend) is an always learning path. You’ll always be learning more and more and this has no end. So embrace that and keep learning!

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