One of the things I really believe in is to never stop learning. Sure you may be busy with work and life and things (who isn't nowadays) but it's really easy to slack off and coast for a few months or a year or more. Some people get a new job and learn just enough to be able to do that job and then coast for years on end.
I'm the opposite type of person and I keep trying to learn and broaden my horizons as much as possible even if the learning does not directly affect my day to day job. It helps me to keep an open mind and think in different directions. So I was really affected when I read this post entitled Moore's Law is Crap from Steve Yegge.
When you graduate from college (or high school, for that matter), you have a simple choice facing you. You can either keep learning, or you can stop.
There is an almost unbelievably easy heuristic for knowing whether you're learning. It goes like this: no pain, no gain. Learning is hard. If it's easy, then you're coasting; you're not making yourself better at something fundamentally new that you couldn't do before.
Overall it's a very interesting post about what really bugs Steve about the way computers and software work nowadays and the slow growth in the field. Are we really saying this is the best that we can do? I guess allot of it comes down to what risks a company is willing to take to make those big leaps in design. Is it possible that this type of forward progress dovetails with what Scoble is saying about shutting down Mini-Microsoft?
Hmmm... food for thought.
Thanks to Eric for the link to Steve's blog.