In this ever-changing world of software development it’s extremely important to keep up with current technologies, methodologies and trends. It can easily get out of hand though – simply there’s not enough time for anyone to learn all new stuff, work and live a normal life simultaneously. Selection is thus the key, being smartly selective about new things to learn so we won’t miss important stuff but also keep ‘junk’ or unimportant trends out.

I created this small and ever-incomplete list of things I feel we all should pay attention to and practice. Some items could be considered ‘old’ (read: more than a few months old) but still not grasped enough yet.

Let me introduce you to an old friend of mine: Hpricot

Hpricot has saved my life many times when I had to parse (x)html documents and extract information programatically. It features a very nice ruby-ish syntax and a blazingly fast xpath-based parser. Combine it with open-uri, and you’re in for a fun ride creating a data-extracting web spider.