Each and every day new technologies are getting introduced. Its quite clear that to be part of the fast moving professional world you should be upto date with the cutting edge technologies in the market. There are lots of example e.g. long time back for a website development people used to write complete Html, CSS and JavaScript from scratch but now there are technologies like Bootstrap, Material Design, AngularJS etc which not just only make our work easy but the are very efficient also.
So the matter of fact is that there are lots of developers around the world who are writing awesome technologies every day for generic use. Most of these technologies are open source i.e. free to use (do have a look on copywrite - as some technologies are free but not allowed for commercial purpose). So most of our boilerplate work can be deligated to these technologies which are written beautifuly and supported by open source community.
So how do we come across these new technologies and how to do learn them. So there is a fundamental rule, during the course of a software or code development if you need a new feature which require you to write enough amount of code first go and search on internet if something already available there. Do not write anything redundant if its already available that too free of cost. There may be multiple options available for the same requirement then how do we compare among the choices.
Things to be followed while comparing between available choices -
- Most of the open source software code is commited on GitHub. Follow the github link and you can check how active is the project and how many developers are working on the project.
- Support is very important for new technology because there are lots of things hidden inside every technology which you cant make guess of. So just check on sites like StackOverFlow that is it easy for you to get answers for questions regarding that technology.
- Documentation - believe me its very important if you dont see any formal documentation you wont be able to use that technology. Most of the good and popular technologies have beautifuly written documentation.
To start with a new techonlogy make sure you get the fomal documentation of all the available features. These documents generally cover every bit of features you are going to get with that library alog with minimal running examples sometime. If you want to gain experties in a new technology dont just read though it's document but keep on pracing on a demo project on you own developement enviorment. This would not only make you expert in that technology but will also improve your dev ops capabilites.