How I Keep Up with Trends

Let’s be honest: this is the most nauseating the tech industry has ever been to me. I remember my JS days in the mid 2010s, learning every framework that claimed to change everything. I would always think, “This is going to be the one I love,” and never find it. (I was meant to be a backend developer and should have stopped messing with frontend frameworks.)

However, while the tech industry is nauseating, it is also by far the most exciting it has been. The speed of innovation is actually insane. That speed brings pros and cons. The pro is new work. The con is the multitasking I now need to do at my job just to stay ahead.

That is where this list comes in. Several people at my company have asked me how I keep up with everything. To be honest, I only keep up to some degree. I am not terminally online, despite my screen time in Ghostty (atrocious pun, I know).

Here is what I actually consume.

Trends / Innovation

• Addy Osmani’s Blog: Addy has helped shape so many of my opinions on agentic AI. 10/10 would recommend.

• Andrej Karpathy If you work anywhere with AI, you need to pay attention to this guy.

• Fireship: Fast, high-level overviews of new tech.
• TLDR Newsletter: Solid daily digest of what’s moving.

AI / ML

• Zachary Huang: Good content for PyTorch and deep learning.
• Ollama / Hugging Face: For tracking new models.
• Reddit r/LocalLLaMA: I mainly stick to the local LLM community.

Developer Workflow / Tools

• Hackernews: The standard.
• Daily.dev: Good for catching what you miss.
• Boot.dev: Fantastic learning site, and their YouTube channel is great too.
• My Own Hermes Agent: Honorable mention. I have several cron jobs that give me reports on specific areas. I usually beat it to the punch by reading things earlier in the day, but I like that it is scanning content I like. It is still a WIP but promising.

Linux / Infrastructure

• Bread on Penguins: Excellent Linux content. Love her videos on different ways to configure Linux.
• Devops Toolbox: Great homelab content.
• Typecraft Dev: Good infrastructure content.
• Vimjoyer: Great Vim and NixOS content.

Systems / Languages

• Anthony GG: The GOAT of Go.
• Arjay McCandless: Killing it with short-form content. Great for system design shorts.

Workflow / Aesthetics

• The Primeagen: Best for vim and workflow aesthetics.
• Bash Bunni: Great vibes and a solid approach to learning. First heard of her on the Backend Banter podcast (Boot.dev’s pod).
• Shan Puri’s Tweets: Great business takes. I somehow got onto his email list years ago and like his 5 tweet tuesday digest.
• DHH: Occasionally worth reading, even if you disagree with him.
• BigBox SWE: Solid backend and career advice.