Reading a couple wired.com articles about how life will be different in the year 2020, a quote by Chris Oaks stood out for me as most telling: "The hardest trick could be to stay sane amid a snowstorm of paradigm shifts."
The most important paradigm shift for web developers going on right now is education. How do you learn what you know? How do you organize what you learn? How do you find what you organized? Here are some tips about making your way through the snowstorm in the next 20 years:
First of all, find some way to feel good about being overwhelmed. There is no avoiding it. You cannot learn enough about the machine a la Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to feel at peace anymore. There will always be a better technology, a faster web site, a more amazing XML-derived script language. Web developers are learning to embrace overwhelmedness now as a natural 21st century state. The rest of the world will figure it out as the pace of technological change trickles down into their handhelds and household appliances. Being overwhelmed is a good thing now.
Second, seek out and stick to awesome methods of online learning. Back in 1998, I stumbled across the online Ziff Davis University which has since taught me more than half of what I know through online classes on topics from XML to JavaScript to E-Commerce to Virtual Communities. Their instructor-led classes enable me to work through books one chapter a week while discussing problems and issues on a discussion board on the web site. Their self-study classes are created with shockwave and bring applications such as Microsoft Access 2000 onto your screen even if you don't have it installed on your computer, then let you interact with it as a pleasant, female voice explains to you what to do. ZDU's corporate education program is at www.zdu.com. Individuals can access their classes through the computer section of www.smartplanet.com. The cost of this education is nominal compared to traditional computer seminars. Online, interactive education like this will become a standard -- our grandkids will laugh at us when we tell them we learned Photoshop by ping ponging our heads between paper book and screen.
Third, find some way to store your notes online where you can access them and refer to them any place, any time. Personally, my web developer site serves this function. I type in notes there whether I am at home, work or at a seminar at the university. All my notes can be found via keyword in the search field. If you don't have such an interactive web site, you could save your notes in files at free online storage services such as Driveway. Another way would be to open up a free Hotmail account and send code snippets and other items you learn to your hotmail account via e-mail. Set up filters on your account which automatically sort your incoming notes into separate subject folders so that you can easily find them when you need them later.
Fourth, work smart, not hard: spend 40% of your time in research and development. These days, finding a new program or a nice snippet of code can save you weeks of work doing it the old way. Scan monthly web developing magazines and sign up for e-newsletters from web developer sites. Like music, information and learning are becoming free. You just need to make the time to digest it regularly. Set off part of your day where you won't be disturbed and work through new technologies, learning the essentials. Take advantage of companies such as Macromedia which has a 30-day trial version with excellent interactive tutorials for each of their products (try out their graphics software Fireworks for instance, a superb graphics application).
Fifth, unite with others, work in teams. As Kevin Kelly hints in his book Out of Control, it is the bee hive which will be the most efficient metaphor of organization and production in the 21st century. In the network age, the works of an individual will be eclipsed by the roaring productivity of loosely organized cyber communities, a la Linux.
The speed of change in our field is only going to get crazier. As they say in German, don't be a "fear bunny" about the future: it's not what you know but how you learn that will count.
