How do I keep up with advances in software engineering?

Adrian Colyer's The Morning Paper[0] blog might be worth a look. (As he describes it, it's "a random walk through Computer Science research")

If there are specific areas of interest, you can click "Tags" in the menu and get posts just about that area, e.g. you mentioned the Dynamo paper, so, you might be interested in developments in distributed systems. There's a Distributed Systems tag on the tag page[1] and, when you click it, you'll get this[2]. And it's a tag-cloud, so you can see by the size of the tags whether a given topic has a lot of entries or just a few.

[0] https://blog.acolyer.org/

[1] https://blog.acolyer.org/tags/

[2] https://blog.acolyer.org/category/distributed-systems/

Not really following the intention here. The Dynamo paper is still worth reading now. There are other research results and applications of them all the time. Most of these take an annoyingly long time to gain adoption so there's not really that much of a rush unless you're actually in the field of creating rather than assessing and using.

Why does it have to be "as they happen?" I'm happy to learn about anything interesting regardless of how old it is. Sometimes an old idea in a new context can have new applications.

HN, best source for 10+ years

you read HN?