Sometimes people ask me how I keep track of all the cool new tools that everyone is using. One of the great things about being at the CNCF is that I kind of ended up in the middle of the intersection of lots of tech people. I'm therefore very privileged to work with so many people and projects. But I did notice a pattern and once I see one I gotta tell someone.

There are three methods that I have used that have really upped my game the past year or so.

The Github Homepage

I am always surprised at the amount of people who don't know that when you follow someone on GitHub you get to see the things they are working on. And what they star! And then it adds recommendations. It gives this to you as a feed:

The CNCF Landscape

The new CNCF Landscape is a great way to keep track of all this. But look at that thing, where do I even begin? Part of my job is to help review incoming PRs to the landscape. I have found that by following the commits you can really ingest things that might interest you. It's a good where do I start? You can follow it here.

Once I started to just consume the incoming changes I was able to find way more cool new stuff than I would. It also includes things like services companies might offer for all of these, so it's also a great way for product-thinking folks to get value out of it.

Homebrew

And my newest addition, homebrew. If you follow the commit log you can see all the goodies. And the great thing about this one is you can really experience how much awesome stuff there is for Linux users in there, it has everything. I made a separate blog post about why I love Homebrew on Linux. And the recent new announcement to have Homebrew support sigstore verification has really turned this into a no-brainer default for me.

Here's how I came to this realization. You can watch the packages get added and updated in the merge queue. Toss that on a second monitor or tablet the next time you want a soothing thing to watch. To paraphrase a friend "Wow, look at all this stuff that will take 6 months to get my distro!" Heh.

And that's it

Personalized recommendations from your friends and projects from GitHub, all the cool cloud native stuff from the Landscape, and then the "Rest of UNIX" in brew.