Catching up with your industry

In an interview with Yelp’s blog, Daniel says:

I usually start the day by catching up on security news, in the form of things like podcasts and news articles and reflecting on how Yelp’s security posture stacks against the real-life events happening in the industry.

Daniel is an amazing engineer and there is a lot I’d love to learn from him. So, I take note:

• News articles
• Podcasts

I think these are the best way to keep up with the latest trends in most industries.

News articles are important because they help you discover new trends you’d otherwise miss.

Podcasts are super useful because they are conversational and they often include easy-to-understand explanations. Talking in a podcast interview is the easiest way an expert could share content. It is easier it than writing a blog post for the expert. For the podcast, the expert needs to just show up to the interview. It could be audio or video.

Books, on the other hand, take years to write. While they are super valuable for consolidating a huge amount of wisdom into one coherent piece, they are a few years behind super current events as found in blogs, news and podcasts.

Introspection

• My industry is database reliability engineering, I need to find and listen to more podcasts about it.
• I use Google Podcasts, but not many podcasts link to it. I might switch to Spotify. The time between pressing the play button and hearing the podcast was impressive. Other apps take many seconds, and sometimes fail to play, but Spotify started playing instantly!
• Hacker News is great for general tech news, but for industry specific news you should probably find another source. Perhaps use Hacker News to find that source :)
• The News page of InfoQ has categories for different industries. It includes Databases and DevOps, and even a NoSQL category.