I, just like most developers, am struggling with serious FOMO when it comes to web development. I talked about it before and I'm still trying to figure out new ways to keep up with web dev.

 

The Twitter curse

Twitter is one of the best ways to keep up with webdev, but unfortunately, it's super addicting, and you would have to deal with everything that comes along with it: memes, tons of developer ego, memes, a lot of pointless discussions, ego, memes, a lot of bullshit, ego, memes.

 

Most of the stuff on Twitter is pointless. Something, something, Pareto principle. You will find a lot of smart people on Twitter, but all the fluff made me look for my webdev information elsewhere. Navigating overinflated egos all day just to get a tiny nugget of information is absolutely not worth it for me.

 

Webdev doesn't change (that much)

I stopped using Twitter for more than two months. Reading and posting. I was struggling at first, because I still wanted to keep up and have a general overview of what's going on, without getting bombarded with people's opinions on Tiger King and discussions about "real" CSS and HTML vs frameworks. Also, I was dying to tweet about everything. Especially stuff that's so irrelevant to webdev, to my followers that mostly followed me for webdev: "HEY GUIIISE I FINALLY WATCHED THE LAST DANCE. 7.5/10 WOULD WATCH AGAIN". K Kitze, please go back to talking about MobX.

 

Anyway, if you look at the big picture, nothing significant is changing in the webdev world. Twitter is blowing every single announcement out of proportion, so it looks like things are drastically changing every day for everyone, which is absolutely not true.

 

Every single dev tweet ever:

 

Aight, cool, let me just finish solving actual problems for my users, and I'll take a look in 2054.

 

The solution

I'm trying to keep up with webdev in a lot of different ways, but outside of Twitter, it feels like nothing is going on. It's weird. I even started a This Week In Webdev show on Twitch so we can discuss what's going on, but I still felt like I was missing out. Whatever happened to Apollo?? Is there a new release??? WHERE IS THE ANNOUNCEMENT TWEET WITH 1937413 EMOJI?!?!

 

I finally started using a tool that finally put my mind at ease.

 

Yup, GitHub.

 

I realized that I can keep up with library releases in a much simpler and organized way:

 

I started watching the releases of a few packages that I care about, and I'm checking my GitHub notifications every once in a while. I read the list of changes, I click around to see certain commits and pieces of code, I close the tab, and I move on with my day.

 

No announcement tweet with 13894139 emoji. No hype. No thought-leaders (God, that word is killing me). No rockstars. No trolls in the comments.

 

Just a package name, a version number, and a list of changes.

 

It's a frickin' npm package after all.