Technology's obsession

Knowledge Vortex

just a little attention, we will find ourselves surrounded by various technologies and tools. the technical radar of ThoughtWorks is updated almost every six months, and in the project there are many technologies that have disappeared from the technology radar, the old technology/old framework is still in service, and the new technology/tools/language/framework is appearing rapidly, some fleeting, Quickly replaced by new, later people. Some stay, but they are constantly evolving, changing (incompatible APIs, different versions, etc.).

I am a front-end engineer of Xi ' an XI Ke Software Technology Co., Ltd., if you are unfortunate also a front-end engineer, then this update speed is also more rapid. Three years ago , Backbone was the mainstream, two years ago was angular.js, last year was react, followed by flux, reflux and other as react expansion and became a new mainstream; grunt popular for some time, quickly replaced by gulp, And the new webpack also vaguely have unification trend. New frameworks emerge almost every week, with two-way bindings, virtual DOM, event proxies, isomorphism, back-end rendering, more friendly syntactic sugars, faster execution speed, and so on, with endless changes in almost any direction.

The back end is no better, container technology, Web Frameworks, ORM, build scripts, automated test tools, dependency management, application servers, and so on, you always have a lot of options, but you can't differentiate between which technology/tool is more reliable and suitable for your project.

In the midst of it, there is often a dazzling, overwhelmed feeling. Knowledge workers certainly need lifelong learning, but like the current rhythm, I doubt whether this is a healthy state. There are often people complaining about it, and it's hard to get started with a front-end MVC framework, look around the project, and everyone is already spike another frame/tool (which means you can't use the framework on the project ...). ）。 Just from the speed of learning, we are far from keeping up with the rhythm of technological evolution, which is a limitation of human beings .

The trap of knowledge

Suppose you're in a On the Ruby project, I learned rails/activerecord/rspec/mysql. If the next project or Ruby, the same technology station, you would think this is a duplication, because in addition to business logic, business objects change, there is no new content, or the same technology. If the next project is Python, and the technology stack becomes django/nose/postgresql, you may feel a boost, as you learn different techniques, frameworks, tools, test tools, and so on, and in fact, this is a repetition, the ancients cloud: " The "person, is also."

at the present time, information is being created much more quickly than people can accept, on the one hand, the speed of information transmission is greatly improved, on the other hand, the channel of information dissemination is very diverse. We are surrounded by information overload, even if you do not actively try to obtain new information, mobile app, Weibo, Flipboard, Pocket, know, developer headlines, Feedly, nutshell, The push of lilac garden and so on is enough to provide you with enough information (most of them have not even been consumed before they become historical information and ignored).

Information on overloading

In such an overloaded environment, it's hard not to feel uneasy about our lack of information, to worry about what important information we have missed, and the fear and anxiety that drives us to spend more time on the acquisition of information and to think more about what really matters.

"How to read a book" divides the book into two categories: one is to provide information/information (known), and one to help you understand (understand) the information. The information itself is not so important in terms of understanding. The fragmented reading that most of us are currently using does not provide us with enough "understanding". We all have this experience, some books are very brain-intensive, tired to read, while others are very easy and easy to consume. Fragmented reading methods are easy to consume and can be read with little thought, but they do not help you to improve your comprehension.

But intuitively we will choose the easy things to do, although this shallow reading only helps to expand the information/information, it is almost useless to improve the comprehension. When we deal with the problems in our daily work, we can really help, only the part of the knowledge that we understand. I in 2014, there have been a few months blocked all, microblogging and other content aggregation class applications, as far as possible to the technical forum, every day is to write code, read paper books, in addition to the first few days of the disturbed, the whole process of the harvest is very large (and did not miss any important information).

Knowledge Framework

A technician sometimes has a "hold" that wants to master all the techniques, which is a ridiculous idea in the outsider's mind, but it's hard to see it in the middle of it. After all, there are so many interesting things, the programming language of various paradigms, compiler technology, artificial intelligence, data visualization, geographic information system, embedded devices, hardware and software combination, big data, automated testing and so on, every direction has endless interesting things.

But today, with so much knowledge, one cannot master all the technology, let alone the new technology that is constantly emerging! This requires moderation to focus on certain technologies, depending on other technologies such as nothingness. of course, it takes a lot of courage and boldness, but only in this way can the technical staff have real progress and achievements.

based on my own experience, I drew a " Web Development "knowledge framework, which contains a relatively full set of skills/knowledge, and I think a"web development "personnel should grasp some of the knowledge points.

before becoming an expert, you need to have a comprehensive understanding of the areas to be studied. That is, to do Web development, you need to cover as many points as possible on this frame. Once you've finished all the nodes in the tree, you don't have to do it again, and you can try to find a branch in the tree and go deeper. This sounds like a contradiction to the ideas in my previous article. Do we really lack front-end engineers? Article, " engineers should not tie themselves to the front-end development, to understand the whole life cycle of software development." " The view here is in fact consistent, that is, first of all, to understand the software development throughout the life cycle of all nodes, and then focus on to find their own points of interest to develop, that is: first build breadth, and then build depth."

Coping Methodsa trap for knowledge

when you want to learn a new knowledge because of your own interests (rather than project-driven, i.e. no actual soil), and if you find that you have already learned it in history, then force yourself to abandon it. For example, you are familiar with RSpec to write tests, suddenly one day, want to learn junit, the right way is to brew a cup of tea, and so the impulse of their own past. Believe me, once you have a Java project, you can quickly master JUnit and quickly find the corresponding feature, just like a colleague who has been working on the Java technology stack for a long time!

Information on overloading

In practice, you must first convince yourself that you cannot master all of the knowledge, even if it is only in the field of software development . With this premise in place, you only need to take the first steps to build the breadth and build the depth :

• Do subtraction (after establishing a knowledge framework, targeted learning)
• Active, deep reading Classics
• Give lower priority to knowledge that is interesting but not in the direction of your own attention

Technology's obsession