No one can keep up with everything, and no one needs to. You focus on the tools that get the job done for you and master those tools. I have got a lot of mileag

No one can keep up with everything, and no one needs to. You focus on the tools that get the job done for you and master those tools. I have got a lot of mileage out of understanding Unix/Linux (dating to the late '70s) and relational databases (introduced in the early '80s). Almost all modern languages derive from C and use C libraries. All of the web sits on top of a few protocols like HTTP. Despite appearances and hype the actual pace of meaningful innovation in the software world seems glacial compared to computer hardware. Learning the foundational skills pays off, because new and novel things will almost always have those fundamentals at their core. We don't perceive the new car models introduced every year as radical or fundamentally different from the cars we drove last year -- if you can drive a car you can easily learn to drive almost any other car in a few minutes. That holds for programming/software tech skills too, though it does take more than a few minutes to learn a new language.