Why you need a personal “technology radar”
Here’s a fun technique for tracking everything you want to research, without losing track of one thing.
I’m subscribed to thoughtworks’ Technology Radar, a “a twice-yearly snapshot of tools, techniques, platforms, languages and frameworks.” It’s an excellent source of information when it comes to new technologies and trends. It’s given me lots of interesting new leads to explore.1
But once I find a new lead, what’s the best way to keep track of all these things I want to research?
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I remember looking over a coworker’s shoulder once. I saw a couple different browser windows. Each one had more tabs than I could count. Literally hundreds of tabs:
I remember asking, “why so many tabs?”
He replied, “well, those are all the different things I need to research.”
I asked whether or not that worked very well, and he admitted it didn’t. Typically, the tabs just kept piling up until either a browser crash wiped them out, or he got fed up and did it himself.
Which of course means all those things he “needed” to research were lost.
This is where I showed him a better way to track his “research landscape” — or, for that matter, any collection of information where you have a lot of different references, bookmarks, pointers to something interesting.
Basically, the idea is to switch to some kind of a spatial map and leverage our brain’s ability to connect information.
Before I show you my map — my “personal technology radar” — let’s take a look at thoughtworks’ version.
thoughtworks Technology Radar vol. 31
This latest edition of the thoughtworks Technology Radar is diving pretty deep into Artificial Intelligence. As it happens I’ve been doing the same, trying to decide how useful or harmful AI is, at least as it exists today.
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