What you don’t know that you don’t know – Discovering more …
How am I going to stay on top of the the flood of best practices in software development, project management and countless other issues and information that are being thrown out in the Web? This is the question that comes to mind each time I find something cool on the Web. Why didn’t I learn of this earlier, I ask myself. How do I stay on top of trends without suffering countless bouts of information overload?
This begins my search for tools that allow for discovery of high quality and relevant material. The Miro Internet TV software gives me some idea as of what I am looking for as well as mail lists. Miro organises video content into channels and allows users to subscribe to these channels. Once you are subscribed to a channel, you automatically get informed of new content in your channel with a summary which will allow you to judge whether to download and watch the content or not.
Another insight for this journey is a topic on the Mifos mail list on distributed source code management tools which included a link to Linus Torvald’s talk on Git at Google. This was such an eye opener since I had been spending lots of time merging my branch of Apache Ofbiz with the main development branch. Not to mention the informative webcast from Jim Webber’s on Service Oriented Architecture [that works].
To begin with optimizing the way I discover stuff, looking at my previous experience, I would first have to;
- Identify the topics that I am interested in
- Find and subscribe to websites (ThoughtWorker, SoftwareCEO, etc) and channels (Miro, YouTube, etc) that are on top of my topics. I find Google Reader a nifty tool to organise such content into a single feed.
- Optimise my social network Google Buzz, twitter and LinkedIn
