How you should choose which technology to learn next

Keeping up with the growing software ecosystem — new databases, new programming languages, new web frameworks — becomes harder and harder every year as more and more software is written. It is impossible to learn all existing technologies, let alone the new ones being released every day.

If you want to learn another programming language you can choose from Dart, Swift, Go, Idris, Futhark, Ceylon, Zimbu, Elm, Elixir, Vala, OCaml, LiveScript, Oz, R, TypeScript, PureScript, Haskell, F#, Scala, Dylan, Squeak, Julia, CoffeeScript… and about a thousand more, if you’re still awake. This stream of new technologies can be overwhelming, a constant worry that your skills are getting rusty and out of date.

Luckily you don’t need to learn all technologies, and you are likely to use only a small subset during your tenure as a programmer. Instead your goal should be to maximize your return on investment: learn the most useful tools, with the least amount of effort. How then should you choose which technologies to learn?

Principles for choosing a technology

Don’t spend too much time on technologies which are either too close or too far from your current set of knowledge. If you are an expert on PostgreSQL then learning another relational database like MySQL won’t teach you much. Your existing knowledge is transferable for the most part, and you’d have no trouble applying for a job requiring MySQL knowledge. On the other hand a technology that is too far from your current tools will be much more difficult to learn, e.g. switching from web development to real-time embedded devices.

Focus on technologies that can build on your existing knowledge while still being different enough to teach you something new. Learning these technologies provides multiple benefits:

• Since you have some pre-existing knowledge you can learn them faster.
• They can help you with your current job by giving you a broader but still relevant set of tools.
• They can make it easier to expand the scope of a job search because they relate to your existing experience.

Three paths to choose from

There are three ways you can build on your existing knowledge of tools and technologies:

1. Branch out to nearby technologies: If you’re a backend web developer you are interacting with a database, with networking via the HTTP protocol, with a browser running Javascript. You will end up knowing at least a little bit about these technologies, and you have some sense of how they interact with the technology you already know well. These are all great candidates for a new technology to learn next.
2. Alternative solutions for a problem you understand: If you are an expert on the PostgreSQL database you might want to learn MongoDB. It’s still a database, solving a problem whose parameters you already understand: how to store and search structured data. But the way MongoDB solves this problem is fundamentally different than PostgreSQL, which means you will learn a lot.
3. Enhance your usage of existing tools: Tools for testing your existing technology stack can make you a better programmer by providing faster feedback and a broader view of software quality and defects. Learning how to better use a sophisticated text editor like Emacs/Vim or an IDE like Eclipse with your programming language of choice can make you a more productive programmer.

Neither you nor any other programmer will ever be able to learn all the technologies in use today: there are just too many. What you can and should do is learn those that will help with your current projects, and those that you can learn more easily. The more technologies you know, the broader the range of technologies you have at least partial access to, and the easier it will be to learn new ones.