How Do You Keep Learning Without Burning Out?
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As developers, we live in a world where new frameworks, tools, and languages seem to appear every month. On one hand, continuous learning keeps us relevant. On the other, the constant pace can feel overwhelming.
I’ve noticed that some colleagues dedicate fixed hours each week to professional development, while others prefer to learn only when a project requires it. Personally, I’ve struggled to strike the right balance like staying up-to-date without burning out.
So I wanted to ask the community here:
- How do you decide what’s worth learning and what to ignore?
- Do you schedule learning time, or let it happen naturally?
- What helps you stay motivated when the “to-learn” list keeps growing?
I’d love to hear how others approach this challenge.
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I only bother to learn what's currently putting beans on the table. I resist the "change for the sake of change" mentality that seems to be rampant nowadays, and fortunately, the bean counters where I've worked (and the project schedule have keep managers desires to use the "latest and greatest to a very dull roar.
Unfortunately, I'm a DoD contractor and they require us to never be more than one major revision behind the latest available, and that forces us to stay relatively up-to-date. This has come to bite us in our collective asses recently because we started our project about four years ago, and that meant React v17. Back last december, react v19 was released, and it was decided to update to react v18 (against my recommendation because v19 was available).
We've been working on the update since May, and we're just now mostly recovered due to breaking changes in React, and a lot of the open-source packages we use. The biggest problems were with the MUI MaterialTable and the react router Blocker component, but essentially, ALL of our code needed to be touched, and this effort has had significant adverse effects on progress in terms of completing the app on time.
Given the breaking changes in v18, and even more breaking changes in v19, I think not going straight to 19 was a huge mistake, but I'm just a guy in the trenches that has to deal with the shit that's gonna roll downhill again when React v20 is released. Hopefully, I'll be retired before that happens (July 2026).
All the devs think we should never have gone with React (NOBODY on the team knew React at all) and instead should have stuck with a Microsoft stack. The app is huge (over 150 "modules") and some truly strange navigation and backend functionality.
As I've learned more about react and typescript, I've grown to hate working on our app. It's an extremely delicate house of cards, as you might expect.
What we "decide to learn" is driven entirely by the requirements of the app.
We don't have any scheduled learning time because it's a poorly designed contract, and the DoD thinks everybody that works for them are already freakin know-it-all experts.
The motivation for most is the paycheck. I'm the ONLY person on my team that writes code as a hobby. It's been this way since at least the late 80's, and it is - IMHO, the best way (and only opportunity) to learn new stuff, and I pretty much tailor my hobby coding to reflect what I'm doing at work, so still, nothing extra above and beyond work.
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Generally, only what might lead to a solution to a problem.
Example: At work, there are other devs who use Python and PYODBC to access the SQL Server database I work on. They were (or maybe still are) having trouble and asked for my help. I try to avoid Python, but I had to learn enough Python and PYODBC to find out what was happening and provide a solution.
This morning I'm looking into why PowerShell is throwing up when I pass a complex command line. So I was just reading about exactly how the WinAPI CommandLineToArgvW function (mis)handles quotes.
Addition:
I also feel that I am more of an explorer than most. I don't generally want to learn what others know; I'd rather learn things which no one else has thought to discover.As Dirk Gently famously says:
"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently, #1) -
When I started my career in the mid-90s, I thought I'd try to learn everything there is to know about Windows development. It didn't take too long before I smartened up and realized it's an impossible task as the goalposts keep moving. Today with web development, and multiplatform targets, it's even worse - much worse.
My approach these days is, learn what's directly applicable to what you're developing, and don't worry about the rest. But I still burned out. I still love to code, but it's been years since I wrote any hobby type of side-project for myself in my own time that's anything above the scale of "small utility".
