How do you guys learn? As we all know, we have a lot of stuff to learn in our field and it's growing and growing and growing. Other than the programming itself, we also have to learn the other stuff like algorithm designs, programming paradigms, big o notations, git, etc. And if you are working, you also need to learn the business rules your clients might have. And if you're unlucky with your job, your boss might even assign you to tasks with a programming language you have zero knowledge about.

So I was wondering, how do you guys balance your life, your family, your studying and your job? And how do you keep your head from exploding with information?

... life...? What is that? Never had one, and don't care for one.

But on a more serious note, it's not necessarily an easy task, but it could be depending on your family and work environments. Let's assume you have a family to begin with, a partner who understands that the never ending studying is part and parcel of what you do and is supportive of you make a huge difference. The same applies at the office.

Guess I'm lucky that I can spend office hours studying, or nights if I so wish. And guess I'm lucky in the way too that I'm a quick learner. I know this won't apply to everyone, but here's how I balance my life: on weekdays I wake up, get dressed and go to the office, usually working from between 7 to 9 am until 5 to 7 pm, and I study on the fly there whatever I need to, or something that comes up I don't know much about and find possibly useful. We have on average once a week some kind of a voluntary workshop/seminar/learning opportunity lasting around half a work day, usually organised by AWS, Mongo or some such, or some in-house speaker lecturing about security or ML or whatnot.

Now this is the part not everyone can identify with: after work I usually either go cycling for a few hours and then get on my home machine and study for a few hours, or study first and then hit the gym at around 9pm. After I've done, it's shower and off to bed.

On weekends, since neither me nor my partner are talkative in the morning, I usually read something educational on my phone while I drink my two cups of black coffee. Then we try this life/family thing for the weekend. I tend to still get my phone out once in a while to read an article or something...

Oh and head explodes from information. That just happens.

Most of that was covered in university. For updates, I just read the docs, define some experiments, run them, analyze the results, then look into the common stylistics and call it a day.

Kids are in college, so plenty of time.

I just wing it and do it on the job. Not the best, but I'm not giving up more of my existence.

I don’t see the growth of useful stuff. Mostly it’s growth of stupidity. Memory works the same, data structures and algorithms have not changed since 30-50 years.
Programming paradigms are the same.
All recent language syntax changes make them semi functional semi object oriented monsters that increase amounts of crap code new grads create in it.

The only problem I see is amount of scrolling and clicking on crap I need to make to find what I am actually looking for. It usually ends on reading documentation and source code cause most what you can find in the internet is either outdated or aligned to simple “junior code” solutions.