This is a blogpost that I have been wanting to write for a while, and since I have gotten asked a lot of questions throughout the years on this topic. How do I stay up to date on relevant topics? how do I learn new things? Therefore I wanted to write down my approach, does not work for everyone but hopefully for some.
If you look at YouTube, there are TONS of different “How to increase your learning by 10x” “This is how to learn DevOps/SecOps/Cloud in 3 months” and there is also of course many eLearning platforms that provide decent content such as Cloudguru and Pluralsight. However, I believe that not many people take into consideration is which format do the actually learn the most from?
Is it by reading? looking at eLearning videos? is it by listening to a audiobook? or is it by practicing? or a combination of all things? or just work experience?
Understanding which format works best
For me, I hate listening to audiobooks and I hate looking at eLearning videos, why? In almost all cases I feel that too much time is spent on “empty” talk, I want to get to the point, I want to get to the topic which I want to understand or learn. That might be because I have some ADHD symptoms, but I lack the patience to watch or listen to that type of content. Secondly I hate reading long books on a particular subjects, while it is better compared to video/audio content since I can skip directly to the topic I want to learn, but the problem with many books is again the filler content.
It took years before I understood that “regular” content like eLearning or books were not a good match with my internal wiring (personality), therefore I took a different approach. When I started my IT career I saw early on that I loved reading blogs! people that have worked on something, tried something or written their own experience on a new topic. The great thing about blogs is that it often combines visuals and “to the point” on a specific topic (without the filler content). So therefore I decided to start my own blog.
After I started blogging I saw that “huh, I’m actually learning stuff a lot faster” after testing out something or worked on some cool tech, then the goal of the blogpost was to try and describe it to others, then years later I understood that the blog was my way to teach others. Each time I wrote a blog post the source was often a combination of something I worked on, tried and researched.
Understood later on that this was the preferred way to learn new things based upon the learning pyramid.
I started this blog back in 2012 while technology was not developing as rapid as it is today. After a while I also needed to find ways to get access to news, updates and new blogs without having 100+ bookmarks (which I had for a long time…) . Therefore I also started to use a RSS aggregator, and today I use Feedly.
Handling all incoming sources
With feedly I have connected to a bunch of sites and blogs from people in the community, so when a new blog post comes out I get easily notified there. Which requires that I at least check it twice a week so the list of “unread” pile doesn’t get to big.
This is a great way to stay updated on new content, announcements from different vendors but also blog posts from people in the community.
Another thing is that not all content is available trough RSS or is even published on a blog post. Much content is also published on Twitter/X or Bluesky, depending on what kind of technology area you are focusing on. GenAI community is still mostly on Twitter/X while Microsoft community is mostly on Bluesky these days. Depending on which area you are focusing on your should do a bit of research which platform provides the best content.
If you use Twitter/X create a list of people to follow, using hashtags is now a total nightmare because of all automated content from bots and so called influencers. While much content comes from social media and RSS blogs but also more people are now posting content on LinkedIn as well, but I encourage you to limit how much information that you collect since it can become really time consuming and become more “noisy”
Right, so what do I do with all this information? Do I just read it and be done with it? well I have a somewhat of a personal workflow. Some times I read something really interesting, and decide that this is something I need to learn more about. As an example, a couple of weeks ago I read about How to secure Generative AI services on a blog, which I firstly found interesting and secondly that I thought that the author was missing a lot of points, so I decided to write my own post. If I have topics that I wanted to understand more about I tend to use a Todo list which right now is in Microsoft todo, but can be any list or OneNote.
In that list I have a bunch of topics that I want to dig more into, where some can be just to do a bit more research, some about trying it out and finally even write about it. At any given time I have a bunch of tasks which are either defined as “need to do more research”, “practice” or “blog”
As a summary of this ridiculous workflow I made this visual below. Sometimes content can also be in the form of something I worked on in a case or other related info.
I should also mention that I have started to use tools like Perplexity the last year or so do extract information across various sources as well. Since this it is a great tool to find and summarize information, because sometimes blogs or even official documentation is NOT clear enough. I also use it when I am exploring out various subjects/topics which I want to write about.
Does it work?
I have been blogging for almost 13 years now, with close to 750,000 words on this site, over a 1000 posts. While I can say that blogging is not for everyone. You need to understand which learning format works best for you. I tend to combine this with public speaking, where I almost always present on a new topic / subject since this also requires me to focus and set a goal for myself (while public speaking is not for everyone as well) but just by trying to explain a topic to yourself or writing it down you are forcing yourself to understand and explain a topic, and for me that has always been the best way to learn new content/topics/areas.
Using this method also allows me to stay up to date on relevant topics which has always been beneficial for me when working on customer projects, helping colleagues and progressing my career even further.