My development team is filled with expertise and experience, I will quite often consult with them to gauge their views. This also expands out to the wider organisation and professions.
I use most sources that have been mentioned already:
GitHub
StackOverflow
Ministry of Testing tool directory
Google
LinkedIn
ChatGPT (cautiously!)
I find new tools from diverse places depending on context:
Community Recommendations: Such forums like this one, LinkedIn groups, and Slack channels are gold mines for practical, experience-based suggestions. It is nice to hear what works and what does not for one’s real-world challenges.
Conferences and Webinars: TestBash, SeleniumConf, and other QA-centric events are among the popular venues for showcasing bleeding-edge tools. Actually seeing and interacting with the products deepens my understanding of what I want to explore.
GitHub and Open Source Communities: All adds up to browsing trending repositories or following some of the most influential contributors, and suddenly one finds very exciting new tools, especially in automation and CI/CD.
Tool Blogs: Atlassian’s or Tricentis’s or JetBrains’s blog posts usually inform me about new feature enhancements, and oh, I never knew there’s such a possible integration with such tool!
YouTube Tutorials and Tool Reviews: Sometimes, watching a tool in action via a review or tutorial uncovers features text sources may not cover.
Internal Team Discussions: My peers or team leads give those inputs based on their personal experience with different tools; hence, these kinds of recommendations map well to the needs of projects.
By this compilation of sources, I adequately have a good view of trendy, practical, and work-fitted tools. What works for you when you want something new yet reliable?
I should be rotating my learning resources, but I tend to have my list pretty short so I don’t get overwhelmed.
I have written this article (in Portuguese but you can use the browser to translate it) with some of my recommendations: Pessoas para seguir e acelerar sua carreira em TI – Testing with Renata
I keep exploring articles, blogs, and communities and if I find something interesting, I google it for official documentation and then proceed with YouTube tutorials. After going through the tutorials I work on my stuff inspired by the existing implementation.
Apart from youtube I also look on other websites like freecodecamp or udemy , etc.
Along with that I also keep checking GitHub from there I get lots of resources that help me learn.
I regularly follow medium blogs as well as dev.to blogs, articles on such websites are also helpful for roadmap for any new tools or framework.
Engaging in webinars and events to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and tools:
Resources I’ve found useful:-
• MoT
• Google
• Meetups
• LinkedIn Posts and LinkedIn Learning
• Udemy
• I’ve recently discovered there is a ‘Tech Book Club’ run at our company. Colleagues have said they’ve found this useful, so I plan to join this year.
@mwinteringham I follow most of the resources mentioned in the comments , apart from that i also follow
for all the lasted tech trends , knowledge base and tools
Not much to add here from me, most sources are mentioned.
Three comments though:
Perplexity , nowadays I use more than “google”.
(Since a lot of search engines are “AI enabled”; might go directly to the horses mouth).
I like that it at least shows reference URLs, which it used in their results.
And the “follow up” question recommendations.. sometimes it actually is an “oh yeah.. I forgot about that” for me.
Events
On bigger events like conferences I like to actively seek out vendors and get myself a tool demo.
Even an easier barrier for me to check out tools I don’t even know what they are about in the first place.
If it is interesting enough; I invite them back to the company for a bigger internal “tech demo”.
Same for cold calling tool vendors.. if it could be vaguely of interest, I play along.
Normally I am open and upfront, if the chance for a sales deal is very slim, so I don’t waste their time.
On smaller events (meetup, barcamp, ..) I sometimes always make it a tool focused event and invite vendors.
Can be combined with an upfront survey to the community, what kind of tool or area they would like to see.
Human network
Listening to other humans (at events, work, community, media, ..) sometimes brings out a passion for a certain tool, so I investigate that.
Or if I need to get a quick top5 list, I look for “experts” in my network and query them. 
Cheers,
Maik
