This is an excellent question. I think this maybe a fault of mine, but I tend to let myself be dragged into new technologies rather than actively pursue them. (What I'll offer in my defense is that I also tend to pursue roles where I'll be pushed to use new things.)
Rationale is that in a world with limited time, I'd rather focus on solving problems external to the technology itself. If I have something in my toolbox that will work, then it's generally the easiest thing to use, rather than learning something new. There's less of an immediate learning curve and fewer of the issues associated with being an early adopter.
Where this changes are in situations where either the investment to learn a new technology is low enough or the potential for return high enough that the learning might be expected to produce a high ROI.
So what that means practically is that I'm looking for things where I either have an immediate commercial need to know it or a strong feeling it's likely to be useful in a way that none of my existing toolset will fulfill.
From the perspective of something like a programming language, this is part of the reason I've tended to like Lisp-family languages as an adjunct to C-family languages. They're different enough that they're more likely to be complementary to each other and it's likely to be easier to make choices about what code goes in which language.
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This is an excellent question. I think this maybe a fault of mine, but I tend to let myself be dragged into new technologies rather than actively pursue them. (What I'll offer in my defense is that I also tend to pursue roles where I'll be pushed to use new things.)
Rationale is that in a world with limited time, I'd rather focus on solving problems external to the technology itself. If I have something in my toolbox that will work, then it's generally the easiest thing to use, rather than learning something new. There's less of an immediate learning curve and fewer of the issues associated with being an early adopter.
Where this changes are in situations where either the investment to learn a new technology is low enough or the potential for return high enough that the learning might be expected to produce a high ROI.
So what that means practically is that I'm looking for things where I either have an immediate commercial need to know it or a strong feeling it's likely to be useful in a way that none of my existing toolset will fulfill.
From the perspective of something like a programming language, this is part of the reason I've tended to like Lisp-family languages as an adjunct to C-family languages. They're different enough that they're more likely to be complementary to each other and it's likely to be easier to make choices about what code goes in which language.