Your work buddies have it wrong. You don't need to "try" new technology, you simply need to "learn" it. When something new pops up, see what people on HN are pr

Your work buddies have it wrong. You don't need to "try" new technology, you simply need to "learn" it. When something new pops up, see what people on HN are praising/hating. Hop on StackOverflow and see what the noobiest questions are for a taste of the installation and compatibility issues. Read some of the questions with multiple replies but no accepted answer to see how toxic or hepful the community around it is. If the new tech has an official forum/chat, hop in there and browse around for a bit. You'll pick up pretty quickly if a new stack, DB, or framework is worth using or not... you don't even need to touch it. Scientists publish papers so other scientists don't have to run the same experiments over and over. We have HN, SO, and other developer communities for that purpose. Read, learn, watch, wait. "Try" at the point you think it sounds so perfect, you have to try it.