{"id":152,"date":"2008-01-09T15:37:12","date_gmt":"2008-01-09T21:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pchristensen.com\/blog\/articles\/technology-decisions-where-to-invest-your-brainpower\/"},"modified":"2013-12-23T12:19:27","modified_gmt":"2013-12-23T19:19:27","slug":"technology-decisions-where-to-invest-your-brainpower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/articles\/technology-decisions-where-to-invest-your-brainpower\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology Decisions – Where to Invest Your Brainpower"},"content":{"rendered":"

(note: inspired by this post<\/a> at SecretGeek)<\/p>\n

(note #2: SecretGeek found this fantastic post<\/a> by the greatly missed Kathy Sierra<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Anyone who spends 5 minutes reading technology news sites knows that there is FAR too much for any one person to learn (there’s almost too much for one person to be aware of). Between big companies, startups, open source, and research, there are thousands of new products, libraries, languages, technologies, etc every year. Thinking you’ll learn all of them (or even a significant fraction of them) is just madness. So here’s the process I’ve used to evaluate things.<\/p>\n

First, I put each thing into three categories:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Things I’ll definitely learn soon<\/li>\n
  2. Things I might learn later<\/li>\n
  3. Things I’ll probably never get around to learning<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    These are the criteria I use determine which category something goes in:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Is this useful to me now? (for day job, startup, side projects, etc)<\/li>\n
    2. How long will it be useful? or When do I expect this to become obsolete?<\/li>\n
    3. How useful is it for the time it takes to learn? or How much bang do I get for my studying buck?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Incidentally, “fun” isn’t on the list, because there are so many options that the ones that look boring to me don’t even register. If they get far enough that I want to evaluate them, they look fun!<\/p>\n

      So here are some technologies along with the category they fall in and the grades they get on each of the criteria:<\/p>\n