A long time ago, I used to jump on every bandwagon that seemed interesting. That lead to lots of wasted time and effort with technological dead-ends. So I over-

A long time ago, I used to jump on every bandwagon that seemed interesting. That lead to lots of wasted time and effort with technological dead-ends. So I over-reacted and only bothered with technology that had been around a minimum of 2 years (or if a "for dummies" book on the subject came out). Some of our shipping products are based on VB6, while some of the others are .NET 3.5. Generally, if some new technology adds an edge, like Entity Framework (the shiny new name for "linq to whatever"), then we use it. Also, for internal tools, any new technology is fair game. So our internal tools have all sorts of bizarre stuff in them, and if that new stuff is useful, we end up using it elsewhere. I don't blog, but I'm thinking of doing it for some educational projects. Making a public promise to do something generally makes you more likely to go through with it and do it: whether it is a project or losing weight. One example is the "build your own CAB" [composite application block] series. http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2007/07/25/the-build-your-own-cab-series-table-of-contents.aspx http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2007/07/25... Something like this project might be what you're looking for to push yourself out of your "comfort zone."