How I keep track with the recent developments in tech

On one hand, you face a constant fear of missing out at almost every step. On the other, there’s an overwhelming noise in news you have to filter through for the right insights.

…and these are only two of the challenges worth mentioning that many of us are struggling with.

Then, for double trouble, having one foot in software engineering and another in product development requires a highly-selective approach on when, how and what information to absorb.

So here’s my own curated list of tech sources that I’m learning from almost every week.

1. Active voices

Doers. My aim is to shape the social media feed with people that have actually gotten their hands dirty and went through what they preach themselves.

If they are outliers, fighting the status quo for the better, in a world where the general feeling is to belong, that’s one further attribute to cherish.

My own feed has changed drastically over the past year, especially on LinkedIn, where I’ve discovered numerous individuals I resonate with, that I shadow and get inspiration from.

To name a few:

• Leah Tharin: talks about product-led growth in B2B. Product manager, involved in the past into SmallPDF, a beautiful service I’ve used for quite some time, albeit from a B2C and free perspective (sorry, Leah). She is currently quite active on LinkedIn, Substack and through her own podcast. Plus she is a flight simmer, what a coincidence.

• Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hannson: these guys are crazy inspirational and I will reference them together, as they actually belong. Founders of 37Signals & Basecamp, responsible for the creation of Ruby on Rails and challengers of some of the most conventionals topics promoted by the majority in tech: leading a self-sustainable business vs. taking investment, staying in cloud vs. back on-prem, scrum vs. real agile practices, even the classic e-mail concept against their @hey alternative.

• Marc Randolph: entrepreneur, co-founder of Netflix. Shares inspiring lessons and actual advice dating all the way back to his early moments of challenging an entire industry, before “Netflix & chill” became a thing.

• Emi Gal: founder of Ezra, an early cancer detection startup leveraging the MRI and AI technologies. A pretty unique thing about Emi, which he shares with the world, is his exercise of periodically tracking more than 120 biomarkers about his health, with a focus on monitoring, awareness and improvement.

• Melissa Kwan: founder, promotes the boostrapping movement in entrepreneurship. She shares the hard truth that a lot others are avoiding and brings a familiar feeling you rarely see online into every post, podcast or discussion.

• Elena Verna: talks about product growth and shares the experience of her tenures as a fractional CxO / Lead / Head of growth in various companies like Dropbox or Miro.

• Nemanja Zivkovic: marketer, promotes meaningful & sustainable growth in tech, with a special touch on B2B.

• Pierre Sabbagh: founder, shares his real-life employee-to-entrepreneur lessons and experiences while building a profitable startup. The good. The bad. The ugly.

• Nuno Maduro: developer, part of the core Laravel team and creator of numerous packages used in many of the apps I’ve built. Actually I’m quite small, so let me rephrase that: …in thousands of apps built on Laravel around the world.

• Povilas Korop: developer, owner of Laravel Daily and instructor for many fresh or even senior other developers out there.

Worth every follow.

2. Newsletters

These are e-mail notifications from projects or industry experts I’m clicking with. They require minimum research from the recipient’s perspective and may often include time-sensitive insights.

In my case, a quick scan usually points out the topics worth diving deeper into and indicates which less interesting subjects to skip.

The following are some that stood the test of time:

• Dev Digest: arriving weekly from the WeAreDevelopers curation team, it’s a newsletter that can usually be browsed in about 3-to-5 scrolls on my mobile phone. It includes tech industry trends, coding tips & event newscondensed as links that can be explored further on a need basis.

• Freek.Dev: as a well known voice in the Laravel community, Freek van der Herten contributes to a large amount of open source packages, co-leads the Spatie agency and is involved in 2 SaaS products. I’m always amazed by his deep technical know-how and the grasp he shows over the most abstract concepts every month.

• AI Tidbits: a Substack powered newsletter on AI, edited by Sahar Mor, an ex-Stripe product manager. Joined it out of curiosity, stayed for the time saved through curated pieces of insights in the AI / LLM world.

• TLDR.Tech: a daily newsletter I discovered recently, compressing tech, startup & product news from various sources. It usually combines summaries of trending news into the first half with headlines only & links to full articles into the second. Perfect to choose the content that resonates with you.

3. Laracasts

A learning platform that embodies the magic of the Laravel Community.

Laracasts touches complex concepts shaping Laravel’s ecosystem and transforms them into easy to absorb, exciting, courses. On top of that, it offers a central place of interaction between the community members through its forum.

I own a lifetime subscription and couldn’t be happier with the progress I made, the skills acquired and the time I saved in comparison to the usual trial & error approach.

There were several topics quite difficult to grasp originally that I managed to master and eventually use in production in little to no time through Laracasts’ courses.

…and the instructors? They are practitioners that walk the talk with passion.

Vue, Inertia, React, AlpineJS, AWS, Docker, Nova, Nuxt, Cashier, Redis and OpenAI are just some of the technologies taught on Laracasts, besides the obvious PHP & Laravel series.

Discover it yourself: https://laracasts.com

I’ve posting this list of know-how resources with the hope that you’ll find the inspiration you didn’t even knew you needed, regardless if you’re working in business, product, development or design.

If there‘s something worth sharing from your side, I’m all eyes & ears.