In many jobs, CPD (Continuing Professional Development) is mentioned. In technical jobs, it is considered important. For programmers, it should be part of their daily routine. Rapid changes in technologies, new languages to keep up with & constant evolution of the marketplace make it primordial for any programmer to actively invest time into learning if they want their overall knowledge to remain current.
But when a programmer is already spending so much time developing his/her primary skills, how can he/she find the time to keep up with all the other areas of the programming field?
I find the following tools valuable:
- RSS feeds relevant to the industry: every day, I open my RSS reader and scan through all the new articles. My favourite source of feeds is Java Blogs but I have a few others in there as well, and there are about 200-300 new items every day in my RSS reader. It doesn’t take long to read the titles and for most of them, I don’t read further but I will normally read 5-10 full articles every day. It takes between half an hour and an hour a day to do this, depending on whether or not these articles lead me to read something else as well (quite often, if I get excited about a new programming development, I will research it further).
- I used to spend a fortune on programming books but I now use Safari Books Online to access all the programming books. It’s a service provided by O’Reilly, but other publishers have joined too, and for about £35 a month ($50 or thereabout), you can read all the stuff online and you can download a certain number of chapters each month as a PDF (to read offline). This is a very convenient way to educate yourself about new technology – I often read introductory chapters of new books simply to keep an eye on new technologies even if I do not want to learn more about them at this stage. The time you spend is up to you but I try to spend half an hour to an hour every day.
- you probably know about Stack Overflow, the website for all your programming questions. I like to browse through a tag or two every day, just to get a feel about something I don’t know much about. I also actively monitor the tags related to my own specialties (Java and Android). Again, the time you spend is up to you, I guess I spend 15-30 minutes every day.
These things do not take much time but it’s their regularity that matters. It seems that I spend 1hr-2hrs every day doing this but as long as you put it into your daily routine, it doesn’t really matter if your daily routine “only” involves half an hour of CPD. What matters is regularity; it’s best to do half an hour every day than 3 hours every week because your brain might not be able to learn constantly for those 3 hours, therefore “wasting” some learning time. Also, regular learning allows your brain to process things in the background, letting your subconscious work things out for you 
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