One thing I hear quite often from people, when they learn that I work in IT, is that in their view the speed of change is so high. And how can I keep up with all these completely new things popping up all the time …

Well, not so much is really fundamentally new. Most of the changes we see are incremental (or evolutionary to use a different term). I was aware of this for hardware and various aspects of software. But for programming languages the extent of old ideas coming up as the “new hot stuff” surprised me. Robert C. Martin has made a video about this (see below). Its style is not really my cup of tea, but it has a lot of interesting information.