This quote "Isolation Kills Innovation" is on the Pragmatic Programmer's community page. And it's true. When we spend all of our time heads down doing any type of work, we lose our sense of perspective, we lose the new ideas. We tend to get stuck in ruts. The old saying "Can't see the forest for the trees" can be applied here.
So what if interaction is harder to come by? What if your company doesn't let you go to conferences? Maybe you don't have active user groups in your area. What are your options? As a consultant who generally works on project at home, this is real concern for me. Last week at RailsConf I realized how much I'd been missing that interaction. (I do have a great local Ruby user's group, but I'm talking about every day interactions.)
Sitting in sessions all day long about Ruby and Rails, sharing a room with Glenn Vanderburg and talking about Ruby and Rails each evening... basically immersing in the Rails experience was awesome. Hearing how people are solving problems really gets my creative juices flowing.
One of the topics I heard about was The Rails Podcast. And wow... I pulled down a few selected entries and listened to them driving around town, filling my "down time". And I've got to say, it's great. I just went back and downloaded the entire catalog!
Listening to Zed talk about how he's using Mongrel and Nginx gives me ideas on how I can do the same. If you're a Rails developers, I'd strongly encourage you to check out this site.
(Someone send me a Java equivalent or two so I can post it too!)
But whatever your language, get out of the house, literally or with blogs, podcasts, and articles. But get those new ideas in your head, mix them in, and see what ideas float to the surface.
Isolation does kill innovation. Don't stagnate.
