In my branch there are a lot of things that make it possible to distinguish someone who does his job well from someone who doesn't. Compliance with norms and standards, the reusability of the code, the consideration of accessibility, and so on. But above all, it is the willingness and ability to update oneself.
It is this quality that makes people who are considered very good in their field right now, still be in ten years' time - and believe me, it's rarer than we think.

In my company I have a colleague who has been trained for a period of time so that he can take over projects or prepare the ground for me if necessary. He was very motivated, so we asked a trainer to come and teach him. He showed up with his little programming book under his arm, and after two or three classes he asked to see my methodology and the languages used.
When he saw the extent of what had to be covered, he withdrew and explained to us that he did not have the skills required to properly train my colleague. Where the bottom line hurts is that we are talking about someone who is a trainer - someone who is supposed to have the knowledge in this area to help others get up to his level, but who did not know what responsive, SVG, Canvas, and so on, were.
The same is true for a person I regularly help by messages, who follows a school in this field. When I see the outdated bullshit they teach him, the precepts of ten years ago that students are forced to regurgitate under penalty of not being given credits, I want to burn kittens.

These people are people who were undoubtedly extremely good a few years ago. But the web is not just any domain: it is a memory game where randomly the pieces change places during the game. To keep up with the rhythm without being submerged, everything hangs by a thread, and this thread is the update.

Of links and feeds

When you start in this job you don't know you're bad. That's the beauty of it. Because no one tells you: the few tutorials you can find in the pitiful French scene all shoot at each other, everybody is just giving their opinion. It is easy to say to yourself that everyone has their own way of doing things.
If you speak English you are already a little more blessed considering the mass of information, but which in turn overwhelms you so much you don't know where to put your head.

In my early days I hit a lot of roadblocks - those moments when you read an article that shoots you between the eyes with a bullet and goes down your spine whispering, "Oh no, you see, you shouldn't have done that at all!"

So I started looking for articles, influential people, who knew what they were talking about and would help me to see things more clearly. My most faithful tool in this matter was Twitter : I started by looking for some hashtags, identifying people who posted regularly. Then from there these people themselves retweeted people they found interesting, etc. until they built my little web and even had myself two or three people following me.
From these people I looked for which ones relayed the articles they found interesting, and which ones actually wrote them. I have put together a nice list of feeds and blogs of webdesigners and webdevelopers who are at the origin of the articles that we do all day long. Major sites, aggregators, etc.

I use Twitter almost exclusively for my work, and Google Reader for my feeds. I have my daily dose of articles to read every day to stay on top. It's part of my job and what I think is necessary.
But.

The Unread Guilt

The single largest complaint that I’ve ever had with nearly ever RSS reader is that they treat feeds like email. If you’re a news junkie and follow a lot of different websites, it’s nearly impossible to keep up on a day-to-day basis (especially with high volume feeds) when you have unread guilt.
In the past, there have been times where I walked away from my Google Reader account for a couple of days, only to come back to a thousand or more unread items — all longing for my attention

– Alex Knight

The problem with that is that you get overwhelmed fast. As I said, the web moves fast, extremely fast in fact. You are absent for a day, you are lazy for a morning, and there are twelve articles hanging from your nose. Then twenty, then thirty. It is impossible to assess the quality of each one without reading them. For a handful you know that they are essential because you have seen them running for several days on social networks but that's all.

I had many relapses where I let my to-read list get longer than the screen and where in an excess of guilt I read them as soon as I had five minutes. The worst part is that there were often fascinating articles. But I was lacking both the time, and the patience.

Then comes into play Fever.

Fever

Your current feed reader is full of unread items. You’re hesitant to subscribe to any more feeds because you can’t keep up with your existing subs. Maybe you’ve even abandoned feeds altogether.
Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what’s hot.

– Feed a Fever

Fever is a feed reader, and a little peculiar one. Where most of the applications/sites of this kind only propose to list the sites you follow, this one does a job over it that makes it easier for you. More concretely, it will analyze then cross-reference the different articles and assign a temperature to each according to the date and its popularity.
Basically at a glance you will immediately see how much an article has been shared and mentioned on other sites in the last X days, and it looks like nothing it will make you breathe a sigh of relief because you will know what you absolutely need to read and what can wait. The more feeds you have, the better Fever will work.

Second point: Fever is really designed with my type of use in mind. The number of unread articles is by default masked, to soothe this famous unread guilt.
You can control everything from the global to the most particular: leave the number hidden, but displayed for some key feeds.

The core is that once you have imported your feeds from your favorite aggregator, even if Fever will work without touching anything, it is advisable to separate them into two categories: Kindlings and Sparks. Kindlings are those streams that you shouldn't miss, and that you know you can rely on their content.
Sparks, on the other hand, are blogs or sites that post ten articles a day, taken from right to left, briefs and so on. These sparks will intertwine and the links that are found most among them will increase in temperature.

In all cases everything is summarized in a section Hot links sorted by temperature.

Set up

The particularity that can be a disadvantage for some people is that Fever is not an online site, it is an application that is installed on a server. It is paid - a one-time fee paid for a license - and it is then up to you to host your Fever on a server.

You send the files, he does two or three checks, you enter your key, and Fever starts his calculations.

Having a fever everywhere

In addition, the fact that this online Fever will be accessible everywhere, including mobile version, an iPhone application is available and Fever goes very well with the famous Reeder or even Sunstroke application.

Your Fever seen from a mobile phone

Interface

As explained, Fever allows you to really customize your feeds with a lot of controls at the global level and by feed. It also offers a wide range of very useful shortcuts for the most agile among you.

In short

Fever really brought me a good breath of fresh air at a time when I felt suffocated by my feeds. I don't think this application will please everyone, it remains for a certain niche of people like me who have to ingest a fairly large amount of news without necessarily having the time that goes behind.
But if I can introduce two or three people to this, then so much the better.