There is so many different topics I want to dig deeper into and be good at. It might benefit me in the future or in my next job.
For example, there are a lot of different programming languages, concepts & tools I want to explore.
We are in a period where machine learning, ai, blockchain (excluding the scams) and now LLM have gained a lot of traction.
It feels to me like I am missing out of so much.
What should I do? How should I approach this feeling? How does HN handle this?
When I look at myself, I feel dismayed. When I compare myself, I find solace.
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No one follows on every single trend. It's hard to not feel overwhelmed especially when everyone in those verticals try to create this fear of missing out because it drives wages up, attracts investors and pumps assets values.
The inflow of almost weekly breakthroughs / amazing demos also takes its toll on insiders. I remember seeing a post on HN from an AI researcher saying that those days everybody in their field was both enthusiastic and close to burnout. Because the rule to make any significant contribution is be first or be best.
Personally, I am trying to ignore it. 99% of what hits the headlines will be irrelevant within a couple of months, context and general understanding are easier to get and more relevant than knowing the very last things that was in the news. I am using the "news feed eradicator" extension to prevent this hectic stream to even reach me.
I also try from time to time to dedicate some hours to toy or to read more about some things that interest me and dive deeper.
Ultimately: pick you battle, you can't become on expert on ten things at the time. You will be bad or superficial at the rest. It's life, be ok with it, we all are.
You don't need to be on the forefront of a technological race to have a fruitful contribution to the world.
I'd say "learn a new programming language" is the worst of them all. Somehow people never really learn the basic result of computer science
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine
which is that they are all the same. "Create a new programming language" is a better way to learn. If you've got a project which has a large amount of discovery (don't understand the domain, don't understand product-market fit, ...) it's particularly deadly to be wasting your time looking up if it is len(s) or s.length or s.length() or whatever to get the length of a string, having fights with your package manager, etc.
Every time I learned a new programming language it was either because I needed it for a side project (e.g. learn shader programming to do a graphics project) or because there was paying work. (So often I have started a new job programming in language X and learned language X on the job)