The first new "tech" I learned was in the early 1980s, so I benefit from the perspective of seeing how my choices have panned out over the short to long term.
And now this might seem weird, but I have had good results following tech trends that attracted the widespread interest of hobbyists. These tend to be things that are easier to obtain, install, and use, and that have communities built up around them. The hobbyists will tend to weed out the things that are just too painful to use.
Examples over the years include Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic, PIC microcontrollers, Arduino, and Python.
Some of these are proprietary technologies, of course, but their vendors didn't abuse us too much (until Visual Basic went overboard with dot-net, whereupon I switched to Python). I got a good solid decade or more out of each of these things.
Of equal or greater importance to the use of these tools is what I can learn. I don't mind throwing a vendor a few bucks if I will use their tool to expand my knowledge, and if that knowledge is applicable to a broader range of things. For instance through Python and the community of developers, I've learned new disciplines that have made me a better programmer in any language.
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The first new "tech" I learned was in the early 1980s, so I benefit from the perspective of seeing how my choices have panned out over the short to long term.
And now this might seem weird, but I have had good results following tech trends that attracted the widespread interest of hobbyists. These tend to be things that are easier to obtain, install, and use, and that have communities built up around them. The hobbyists will tend to weed out the things that are just too painful to use.
Examples over the years include Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic, PIC microcontrollers, Arduino, and Python.
Some of these are proprietary technologies, of course, but their vendors didn't abuse us too much (until Visual Basic went overboard with dot-net, whereupon I switched to Python). I got a good solid decade or more out of each of these things.
Of equal or greater importance to the use of these tools is what I can learn. I don't mind throwing a vendor a few bucks if I will use their tool to expand my knowledge, and if that knowledge is applicable to a broader range of things. For instance through Python and the community of developers, I've learned new disciplines that have made me a better programmer in any language.