For me, that’s been forcing myself to start to move away from easier to read blogs and read things like IEEE Software articles and papers published by ACM members. There’s really good stuff in there, but it only comes out with investment of some serious time (I’ve had to read some things 5 or 6 times before understanding it).

I suppose it’s making me believe that I really don’t want to become a super-expert in some specific technology like WCF, WPF, MVC, ASP.NET, etc. Doing so will only prove to be a victory for a brief time until the technology is superceded. I’d rather invest my time learning ideas that have a much longer staying power (algorithms, core principles like separation of concerns, zero knowledge proofs in security, etc). It takes time to apply the “test everything, and cling to the good.”

The problem is that the latter is less esteemed in social circles because it might not help bridge “that last mile” between theory and the need to get the immediate job done of knowing exactly what class to use or what the third parameter of a specific function does.

Clearly you have to have quite a bit of knowledge of a specific stack to solve a particular problem of the day. There has to be some balance. But the true test is the weight that you place on learning things outside the tactics of the day to day. This is what will last longer. Improper weighting is why we as an industry are still writing with Fortran style primitives, even when much more efficient (from a thinking/code perspective, not necessarily execution perspective) exist. It’s why just knowing how to spell HTML on a resume got you a high paying job in the bubble.

But the good stuff lasts: have fun at your job; do what you find interesting, but always find stuff that challenges you in a way that helps you grow professionally and that gives you lessons that you can store away in your mind to keep the fun lasting.