Medium can be one of your best allies in this neverending task of keeping pace with the updates in the Tech Industry.
All of us that are here use Medium. I am a little bit Captain Obvious here because if you are reading this, I am sure you are already using Medium for professional growth and to learn new things, but I’d like to highlight how I use it to keep pace with the current situation.
You know that things change so fast. Of course, this is happening for all industries and businesses, but this is even more pressing in the technology industry.
We’re seeing new technologies each week or even each day. Frameworks change as fast as we can imagine, and try to keep the pace of that is quite complex for any of us. So, we must use all the tools at our disposal to make sure we do our best in this situation.
#1 Tune your Personalized Recommendations
One of the great things about Medium is that it uses your interests and the articles you have been reading and how much time you spent reading them to recommend new articles relevant to you.
So, here the recommendations are clear: Use Medium all the time. Try to use the search capability to search into many available articles because the most you use it, the most accurate the recommendations are for you.
I had a time, a few weeks ago, when I was really interested in Modern, Cloud-Native Data Architectures because of some professional duties. So I have started to look for those articles in Medium. Since that time, the recommendations have been quite accurate of what I was looking for and help me to improve my knowledge and find articles that I had no clue that was available at Medium.
Additional to that, you need to make sure your interests are well set. Usually, when we set up an account and ask about our interests, we probably don’t think about it for so long because of the only thing that we want to get access to the content right now (guilty person here!).
So, you must take your time now to make sure the interest you selected when you joined is still the most relevant for you today. If you want to check your current interests s you need to go to your profile and click on “Control Your Recommendations,” as you can see in the picture below:
Also, you will see the topics that you’re interested in now and a bunch of suggestions of new topics based on your reading history that they think you could be interested in. So it is important to visit the page from time to time to make sure these are accurate and check the recommendations they’re providing to you.
#2: Read Later Feature
Another key feature is saving all the interesting articles to continue to read them later or keep it as your own library. This is the main use I do to that concept. I try to use the Read Later feature to create and manage my own “Medium-based library.”
And the main reason behind this approach is because we all have suffered this situation when we found a great article about a topic. Still, we change to another task, and later, when we need to find that article again, we don’t remember the title or the author, and we spend so much time trying to locate it again.
#3: Search Capability
Even when we are used to using Google as our main search option to search for anything but I think it’s important to use the search capabilities in-site Medium because several reasons:
- The content we have available in Medium is huge, and most of them is of great quality because of the curation process.
- It is important to get Medium to know you better, and that will fine-tune all the recommendations we already have been commented on.
And all of this without worrying that you will find a lot of advertisements based on your search history 🙂
#4: Medium Member
And I have left to the end the one that I think is the most important part: Become a Medium Member.
Medium is so great, no matter if you are a member or not. Still, when I wasn’t a Medium member, it was just annoying to find the article that I need, but I cannot read it because I already spent using the “starred” articles for the month, and I need to wait an additional time month. So we know that this is not valid if you want to keep updated in the tech industry, so please, make yourself a favor and just become a Medium member. You will feel more comfortable around the platform, and you start living inside it.
