To be a resourceful developer, it's important to keep up with new trends and current best practices to be applied in our own projects. Below, I share my current resources I use to find new projects, ideas, and discussions.
Blogs allow industry experts and other enthusiasts to share their knowledge on a topic that interests them. Many times, this is an exploration of a topic that tends to cause trouble for many developers. Other times, authors simply want to share some of their own guidelines and practices.
Here are some of the blogs I follow:
Online magazines offer articles from a variety of authors:
A RSS reader may come in handy for keeping track of new posts. I personally use the Feeder extension for Chrome.
Blogs are usually most useful for in-depth discussions of focussed subjects. On the other hand, tweets are forced to be more concise, hence tend to be impulsive. A tweet can include an interesting tool or article the author has found intriguing.
Blog authors and industry experts are a good starting point for people to follow. From there, Twitter will periodically recommend others with similar expertise that you may be interested in reading.
In order to keep up with tweets, I use the Twitter Notifier extension for Chrome, which provides desktop notifications for new tweets.
The idea of social news is to implement a democratic-style voting system to article submissions. Not only are the articles themselves useful for learning, but I find that the comments invite a variety of perspectives in the form of reactions, criticism, and further reading.
It's important to find a social news site which appeals to your interests. Hacker News was originally targeted towards startup entrepreneurs, but has invited discussion of tech news and development practices more generally. If you want a more targeted discussion group, Reddit's many sub-reddits may be more relevant. Some of the more popular sub-reddits include /r/webdev/ for web development, /r/javascript/ for javascript, or /r/programming/ for programming in general.
Throughout the year, there are numerous technology conferences which developers can attend to refine their skills. While it's not always possible to attend these conferences, we're fortunate that many speakers and conference organizers upload their presentations for the general public to consume. Each of these presentations provides an expert's concise summary of a broad topic, so is helpful in attaining a minimal understanding.
Addy Osmani recently shared a curated list of talks for front-end engineering at Smashing Magazine (link). Smashing Magazine itself recently held its own conference, of which many videos are now available online. For a more general resource, Speaker Deck and SlideShare are platforms which allows speakers to share their presentations online.
These are my own sources which I find useful. If you are aware of other useful resources and want to share, feel free to get in touch with me directly or leave a comment.