Barrier to Entry
There are barriers to entry in every industry...

I'd suggest that most in most industries, cash is the biggest barrier, in Software Development it's time.

Remaining up-to-date with even a handful of development tools requires a significant amount of time and effort and an architectural role requires significant knowledge, both in breadth and depth.

There are a variety of sites that can help with the breadth of knowledge...

• The Serverside - aspects of J2EE


• CMS Watch - Content Management Systems


• ON Java O'Reilly Java technology


• ON Lamp - O'Reilly Linux/Apache/MySQL technology


• O'Reilly's "New and Upcoming" books section is a good bellwether for upcoming technologies.


• XML.com - another O'Reilly site


• Apache's various sub-projects

I tend to read most of these at least every couple of days...

Of course there are a variety of other sites in my bookmarks but these are key to keeping on top of technology...

For depth? Nothing beats printing out and reading the documentation.

I have one more tip...for getting a good overview of new technologies nothing beats Google's "filetype:" searching.
- posted by bigkevmcd @ 2:17 AM