"It is always good to keep yourself up to date with the hottest tech stacks."

It’s good to be aware of new stuff, but it’s also a good practice to have a firm command of some well established technologies that have strong support and resources behind them.

It’s been my experience that I get more work done when I can easily find sample code and multiple explanations for API calls. Experimentation and R&D to figure out some bleeding edge stuff may be fun but it’s a lot slower and less stable than using tried and true methods.