As other mentioned networking is very important I recently open up and the result is beyond my expectation i was working alone for years, but now i am a technical team leader on big company all this happen was because of networking, to your surprise i am a self-thought developer and the only one without cs degree within an elite programmers who are graduated from top university with high GPA, i get out of my comfort zone it was hard but i did it and the reward was big. About learning new things, i think focusing on the core things is very important and this won't take much of your time, i am not against catching up with new tools, libraries and technologies, there are the lot of people who are good at a certain specific tool but I feel there are few guru programmer who can debug out of any obstacles. The latter is more important and the focus should be on how to become one of them.