It is undeniable that web technologies nowadays changes rapidly. This is wonderful because we are optimizing and finding new ways to create solutions for our problems. Nevertheless, it is very hard to keep up with all the changes in technology in general, especially web design and web development. I remember those simple days when a Webmaster was somebody that can create a simple design, create a HTML page and upload the files to the hosting. Now, those days are gone and even for creating a simple website, there are numerous amounts of theory and practice involved, in order to create a good user experience. For example, just in order to work with JavaScript properly, it is necessary to dedicate a lot of time into the language. You can work with JavaScript from 10 years ago; but you probably won’t find a job in the field or create a professional and secure site with outdated techniques.
Today, the amount of people contributing to the web is abundant. Those developers and designers work on open source, blogging, or contributing in any way possible and mostly free. Thus, new trends and techniques are rising every day, and we should be able to keep up with those changes and not stay behind.
What should I Do?
The first thing is to understand that there is no way that you can know everything or keep up with everything with the web right now. In just one day, there are tons of articles coming from everywhere: usability, web design, accessibility, programming languages, user experience, web frameworks, security, databases, etc. In short, the webmaster era is long gone and that is okay. Nobody expects you to know everything and if the job requires you to know everything, you are better off without that demanding job. Those jobs are usually subpar companies that don’t know what they are doing or what they want. You will end up probably working everyday of the week and still miss deadlines, because the problem is coming from the top.
Second, you don’t need to know everything in order to work with web technologies. It is better to just keep an eye to new technologies and popular blogs in the field. If you try to keep up with everything, you will end up overloaded with unnecessary information that you might never need. Also, be able to learn them and study them deeply just when you need them in your work or when you have free time. There no need to jump into the latest framework, because if you need to do that, then you are not doing your job as a professional developer and wait until the framework matures.
In conclusion, as we cannot catch up on all the new trends, it is better to base our learning on projects. We should research what is needed to be done in our projects and from there, look for the best fit for the job. In that case, we can learn and implement new approaches in design and development for our projects. That way, we don’t learn just for learning, which was fine in the past, but learn while doing something productive.