Non Tech Question. How do you keep up with all the Info coming in?


Userlevel 7
Badge +22

Hey folks,

 

A non tech question. How do you keep up with it all?

Background. Since becoming a Veeam Legend a year ago I have made an effort to focus more on social media. I engaged Twitter and started a daily Linkedin watch. Every time I see something interesting I follow the person, I have also added a huge number of Linked in connections (nearing 1000 now!). The other day someone asked if I had not seen their post on Twitter. It was a great topic and the person knew it was of special interest to me. It became clear that I am simply not able to keep up with the constant stream of information. 

What do you guys do? Can you create special watch groups for important feeds? Or should I just become a linkedin/Twitter junkie a la Facebook early 2000s and if my phone dies when camping up North in the woods go into severe withdrawal ! :) 


11 comments

Userlevel 7
Badge +17

:sunglasses:  I think you cannot keep up with everything. It gets more and more every day.

Userlevel 7
Badge +20

I use the app Feedly to grab RSS feeds relevant to the industry, blogs and KB sites etc. I have it categorised to a separate group compared to personal interests, so I can filter out between them, if I’m interested in reading something but won’t have time I can mark for later, and the default view just shows the latest 48 hours of posts, keeps the feed clean of those “I want to read this but realistically I never will” posts.

 

With Twitter the use of lists is helpful, I’d also suggest using muted words on Twitter, for example my Twitter feed was getting filled with Wordle, so I muted the word and then the feed immediately became more informative.

 

For the absolute core essentials such as this forum, it’s set up to my personal email address so I can be notified when something is going on.

 

That’s my process, it’s not perfect, but it helps.

 

I accept that I can’t be a master of everything so I’ve got a separate “nice to know” category of industries that I still would like to keep up with, but aren’t related to my industry anymore. So SQL/Sophos/VMware Horizon/Teams for example, it’s nice to know sometimes what’s going on in those categories but it doesn't impact my job or my life.

 

But I’d also suggest going the otherway and enabling screen time restrictions for such apps, they can be a huge time sink. You’re a content creator yourself @Geoff Burke and the content you’re making on Kubernetes is extremely valuable, the more time you’re reading other content you’re consuming and not producing, so give yourself time to focus on your own projects too :relaxed:

Userlevel 7
Badge +9

:sunglasses:  I think you cannot keep up with everything. It gets more and more every day.

This is the truth! You cannot just keep up with everything with the influx of new technologies. 

Userlevel 7
Badge +9

I use Feedly too and it is a very valuable program! Also, for the “For the absolute core essentials such as this forum, it’s set up to my personal email address so I can be notified when something is going on”.

  • What I did was to create a folder and created a rule to redirect all post there. In this way, I keep n eye of every post coming from Veeam. 

Above all,  I learnt from your write up! Thank you for sharing @MicoolPaul 

Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Yes, I use Feedly for the most RSS feeds, too. And Feeder for some special ones like the Veeam RSS feed, because it can sent notifications if there is something new. So, I can read the important things at once or at least at the same day and the other ones if there is some time...

For some ssits where you have to register with your email address and which are sending notifications by email I use rules to sort the mails in different folders. The same here, important folders have a number at the beginning, so they are at the top of the list and are read first. The other ones are further down and are read when there is time...

But information gets more and more and there are more interesting topics and products every day, so I had to accept that I cannot see and learn everything. :sunglasses: And I think this is very important, otherwise you will burn-out yourself… And don’t get any work done.  :joy::joy::joy:

Userlevel 7
Badge +20

Many things -

  1. RSS for Veeam KBs, VMware, etc.
  2. Twitter
  3. LinkedIn
  4. Email tech subsciptions to a variety of things
  5. Reading and trying to keep up :joy: ​​​​​​​
Userlevel 7
Badge +7

To be honest, it is very easy to be overwhelmed with the amount of stuff out there to keep a track off. I tend to use a variety of sources. 
 

- Twitter for seeing what is currently going on

- RSS feeds for more deep dive information

- Blogs for product specific information

 Sometimes I bookmark and come back to it later if I want to learn something or I get curious about something.

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +13

That's true, of course! the input is overwhelming. It's difficult to separate the useful from the less important. I personally can't do that with social media, or I've given up on it. Feedly is my friend here to find new posts that are interesting. 

Userlevel 5
Badge +3

Just my input as a support person...I don’t.

Seriously, feeds and aggregators just add another task list which I don’t need :) When we understand how technology tends to work and when you understand the basics behind the scenes of most tech, it’s a lot easier to stay on top of it as then new tech announcements are less about the technology, and more about the nuances  and how it differs from the original project/RFC/whatever.

We deal with this in Support a ton as every environment we face is truly unique; one case entire environment is a few Windows/Linux servers backed up by agents. Next case you’re dealing with a VMware environment across 4 continents and 2000 VMs in the job and some custom built storage array to cram it all into.

There’s just too much to constantly chase every new article or tech announcement (and in my opinion, most such announcements are too “fluffy” to be of use anyways)

 

When I was on Support Tier 1, I ingested the information in the following way:

  1. First give myself an honest ranking in all the technologies I deal with on a weekly basis; use broad categories here as in general technology is a lot of the same basic categories (networking, storage, programming logic, databases, AWS/Azure/GCP (each deserves its own category really), and just understand your technical profile a bit
  2. For your strongest categories, check the resources you’ve used in the past to learn them; somehow you got strong here and likely you have some resources already that “work” for you and they might have information on your weakest categories
  3. Pick a category you want to focus on and learn more about and start just searching for basic tutorials and articles, or just keep an eye out for them on whatever sites you usually check. For hardware, reading reference architectures usually is helpful to understand the general concept that the hardware vendor tries to push; understanding the intended use cases means you can guess pretty readily what it’s doing behind the scenes. For software projects, if they have an open git, go there and read comments and issues. The developers often share their thoughts a lot; if the devs have a blog, check that out cause it’s where they will dump their thoughts on programming and stuff in general
  4. (For .NET/C# exclusively) MSDN has amazing content that Microsoft seems to do everything in its power to hide :D But for most microsoft tech, just search “[term] MSDN” and see what comes up. It will be very dry, but if you’re actually interested in the subject, it’s worth the time to decipher it.

Try to give yourself perspective too on things:

  1. Not everyone who writes on a subject is worth listening to. A lot of “popular” places are very much so optimized to get traffic, not to provide information. Those that can successfully do both are rare. If an article doesn’t give up the goods in a paragraph or two, I usually skip it as it’s just not worth it. Same with forums; I can honestly say in general Greeenposters on Veeam forums and the other contributors tend to be of a higher class than other forums; good evidence, clear reading, and the only intention seems to be just to share. I cannot say the same for other forums.
  2. Not everything is worth trying to learn. Crypto followers can attest to this as there’s a new crypto project born every minute that “revolutionizes” something, but in fact it’s just another version of what we already know. Try your best to sort this out and see if it’s really something worth checking out.
  3. Focus on the core technology, not the nuances. Tech loves to sound impressive, but really, if we’re honest with ourselves, most modern magic in tech is just intelligent caching and use of BTrees/Merkle Trees. If you understand the core of what the tech is doing, suddenly it’s a LOT faster to get your head around it.
  4. Don’t force yourself to digest what you’re not interested in. Some topics just won’t click with you, and you will spend the time reading it, but for sure you aren’t going to actually grasp it. Even worse, passive reading like this from certain community sites might end up feeding you bad information, as the wisdom of the crowd is not always that wise
  5. (Corollary to 4) Focus on what’s relevant and interesting to you now. What are the problems you’re having? What are you working with daily? Nothing helps guide interest like an immediate need, and since tech is so intertwined, you can see how your “weaker” subjects might come up during your research.

This is pretty general I know, but it’s how I filter a lot of information for all the different cases and technologies we troubleshoot at Veeam.

The only real aggregator site I go to is Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) and I like to find small personal blogs that do detailed break downs of various subjects. When I find them, I typically check out their other posts also and find some stellar resources.

 

Hope it helps someone.

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

For me is really difficult stay in tune in all things in our tech life.
Now a days I just used favorite browser tabs to keep in touch with all vendors and news.

What kind of RSS feed have you been use?

Userlevel 7
Badge +9

For me is really difficult stay in tune in all things in our tech life.
Now a days I just used favorite browser tabs to keep in touch with all vendors and news.

What kind of RSS feed have you been use?

You can try https://feeder.co/, this is what i use! @MicoolPaul, @Chris.Childerhose and @JMeixner etc. have got many vital comments above . You can also try the following below by following what you like.
- Google news. Here is an example: https://news.google.com/publications/CAAqBwgKMM_ZogswkuS6Aw?oc=3&ceid=US:en&hl=en-US&gl=US 
- Feedly: Here is an example: https://feedly.com/i/subscription/feed%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Ftechdirectarchive.com%2Ffeed%2F

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