Dev Stories #2- The Curated Feed

Intro
Improving your skillset and gaining more knowledge is an important topic whether you're a chef, doctor, artist, student or game developer. The ways we decide to consume new information is as important as the learning the actual skill. You can always force yourself to learn some new skills, but if there's no long-term way to gain more knowledge in a natural way, the progress gets easily "bottlenecked" in some point.

Curation
Most content that we consume nowadays is almost always curated, whether you watch news, youtube videos or read articles, there's always some person or algorithm that curates the content and serves it to you. Sometimes you are aware the you are consuming a curated list of content, like Spotify playlist but sometimes you don't pay any attention to it. 

The key idea with curated content is that there's someone who does the job for you, someone who saves your time and helps you reach the desired content faster than you would be able to reach by yourself. You basically want that there is a people/software/site that optimizes your efforts that goes into learning new stuff.

This sounds pretty straightforward and obvious, but I personally know from working as a teacher, seeing students and observing how people learn new stuff that this curation ideology isn't that "rooted" in our mindset when we want to learn more stuff and gain more knowledge. For example, I would argue that less than 5% of the gamedev students that I taught when I worked as a visual game design teacher knew how to utilize this curation ideology when they started their studies.

The Low Effort Routine
I think it's reasonable to think that most of us follow some sort of news every day. You might not even be that interested in most of the topics when you read the headlines, but in case we follow these news reading routines because we want know what is going on, what is the hot topic and the effort that goes into these routines and reading headlines is really low, until you pump into something that seems interesting and you might click the headline and give it some more effort.

In my opinion learning new stuff should (most of the times) be just like this, low effort daily routines, that are easy to maintain and it doesn't feel like you are working in order to forcefully learn something.

The Feed
The final trick here is to combine these low effort routines towards this curated feed of content that is spesifically tailored for you and your interests. The person who chooses the content for this important feed should be you, because you know yourself the best, far better than any algorithm.

If you want to step into this improve your knowledge/skillset daily mentality, I would highly recommend that you invest some time to set up a proper RSS-feed solution that is designed for you. There are multiple good solutions out there, but I would lean towards something that is minimalistic and works really well on mobile, in order to have those low effort scrolling moments.

My software of choice for this tailored feed has been this thing called Feedly for nearly ten years now. I have over 300 top-tier content creators, blogs and curated gamedev stuff linked there and I also follow this daily routine where once per day I scroll that feed and I have maintained that daily routine for multiple years just because there's no effort required.

The cool thing with this feed is that you are now constantly "vulnarable" for things that you find interesting and might want to learn more, this means that even you aren't looking for stuff to learn you easily find yourself learning stuff kind of automatically or out of curiosity.

Here's the link to that Feedly, maybe give it some effort at first (or other similar tool), link the right curated content, personalize it for you and see what happens after multiple years of low effort daily usage.

https://feedly.com/

- Antti (Developer)