Originally published internally 15 Dec 2015:

I recently came to a realisation that every hire I’ve made has been for an aptitude to change rather than a given set of skills. This makes my most important interview question ‘how do you keep up to date with tech?’.

Tech is changing all the time. I constantly hear statements that the rate of change is accelerating – something that I don’t happen to believe, but even with a steady rate of change like Moore’s law there’s a whole lot to keep track of. The fire hose of tech news can be hard to manage, so it’s important to have good filters. My friend JP Rangaswami often quotes Clay Shirky’s ‘filter failure‘ when talking about the danger of information overload.

My coarse filters are Feedly [1] and Twitter, but there’s a much reduced output from that, which is stuff that I find interesting enough to add to Pinboard in case I want to go back to it later. Even that’s probably too much – I bookmark a ton of stuff on politics, religion, law and order and all manner of other subjects that have nothing to do with tech. As a new iteration of my earlier experiment into directed social bookmarking I’ve created a feed that’s being pulled into the technical design council (TDC) Slack team, simply by tagging things tdc. Pinboard very usefully allows me to easily turn that into an RSS feed for consumption by your favourite aggregator (which brings us back to Feedly if you don’t already use one, and the sad demise of Google Reader).

[1] I could probably share my Feedly feed list if anybody is interested – though beware that it’s large and very specifically tuned to things I’m interested in.

Retrospective

I keep on tagging things with ‘tdc’ and occasionally I bump into somebody who’s following along and finding some use. This post also unearthed a bunch of Feedly fans.

Original comments

I’m not going to post the original comments, as they’re mostly self referential to the people who made them, and hence impossible to psuedonymise.

I did myself however discover some Feedly sharing options, and posted this great ‘2 Kinds of People‘ cartoon: