24th Sep 2010
What To Learn?
I’m in a bit of a Quandry.
I’m in all out job search mode, and I get a fair number of inquiries from recruiters each day. They seem to like my resume.
So far, so good.
The thing is, I do know a wide range of tech, and much of what I see fits me well, but there is often some skill that I dont have, such as some language or some bit of technology. Either I dont know RoR well, or .Net, or am rusty on Java, etc.
There is so much that I could learn, but there is only so much time.
So that is the fun part.. I am a great generalist, and am interested in a lot of facets of Tech. So what to focus on? It’s no good changing gears every day.
My idea at the moment is: I’ll jot down the things I am very interested in learning. and hopefully a couple of folks will write me and say “well hell, Daniel, just dont sleep — you mean to say you dont know all of this already!?”
Languages and Frameworks
- PHP – I know 5.x, and a bit of CakePHP. So, Zend Framework? Symfony? CodeIgniter? Others?
- Python / Django? – I’ve gone into python and have made minor changes. I like Python from what I know of it.
- Ruby / RoR – I’ve done some Ruby on Rails tutorials, and dug it. I have not had a project to really get my feet wet with it.
- Perl – actually, I am pretty good wth Perl. I just have not touched it much since 2006 at Friendster. I actually wrote a perl shell back in 1992. Catalyst Framework? Mason?
- C# / .Net / Mono – this may come as a surprise to anyone who knows my leanings to all things Mac and Linux. My interest comes from wanting to do more with two key projects:
- OpenSim – yep, OpenSim is written in C#, and runs on .Net or Mono
- Unity – the scripting languages for Unity (JavaScript, C#, and Boo) run on top of Mono, and access underlying .Net libraries. I also love the idea of Embedding Mono for other projects.
In the category of “well, if I need to go back to…”:
- Java - I have not done new java code since 1996! I would not want to work on client side java at this point (who is doing applets at this point?) — I would be into the whole Eclipse + server side angle (I’ve worked a bit with Weblogic and Presto) Java has so many technologies associated with it at this point, that it is hard to know where to jump in.
- Flash / AS3 - I have not touched flash much since 2005. I think HTML5 + JS + CS3 is the way forward. I do like ActionScript, which is a close cousin of JavaScript. When I dealt with AS2, I had one entry point on the first frame and used a lot of classes. I didnt do the snippets attached to the timeline deal. My leaning is that I could back into flash again for a specific project, but there are many other things I’d like to learn first
- C / C++ – It’s been forever ;)
Content Management Systems
Ok, which to learn? Drupal? Joomla? Wordpress?
NoSQL / SMAQ
I’ve been reading a lot about NoSQL, and just came across this article about SMAQ (Storage, MapReduce and Query)
What to learn? Hadoop? CouchDB? Cassandra? Voldemort? etc…
Besides Programming
It’s obvious I am interested in a wide swath of the programming side.
Now, if someone were to ask me what I would do besides programming, I would say photography, writing, or possibly speaking / demoing.
The other big interest of mine is multimedia. I know a bit, but wish I could just dive into
it for a year and learn a lot more. Some apps I would like to know would be:
Logic Studio
Final Cut Studio
PhotoShop CS5
Maya / 3DS Max / Blender
A lot of the output of this would be directed towards work in Virtual Worlds (assets in
a Unity project, as one example)
(in other words, I know a bit of the creative side, and wish I had the time/money/chance to
really learn a lot more of it)
Anyways, to sum up, I’m interested in a lot, but every situation wants different skill sets. Hard to know where to focus!
I’m in a bit of a Quandry.
I’m in all out job search mode, and I get a fair number of inquiries from recruiters each day. They seem to like my resume.
So far, so good.
The thing is, I do know a wide range of tech, and much of what I see fits me well, but there is often some skill that I dont have, such as some language or some bit of technology. Either I dont know RoR well, or .Net, or am rusty on Java, etc.
There is so much that I could learn, but there is only so much time.
So that is the fun part.. I am a great generalist, and am interested in a lot of facets of Tech. So what to focus on? It’s no good changing gears every day.
My idea at the moment is: I’ll jot down the things I am very interested in learning. and hopefully a couple of folks will write me and say “well hell, Daniel, just dont sleep — you mean to say you dont know all of this already!?”
Languages and Frameworks
- PHP – I know 5.x, and a bit of CakePHP. So, Zend Framework? Symfony? CodeIgniter? Others?
- Python / Django? – I’ve gone into python and have made minor changes. I like Python from what I know of it.
- Ruby / RoR – I’ve done some Ruby on Rails tutorials, and dug it. I have not had a project to really get my feet wet with it.
- Perl – actually, I am pretty good wth Perl. I just have not touched it much since 2006 at Friendster. I actually wrote a perl shell back in 1992. Catalyst Framework? Mason?
- C# / .Net / Mono – this may come as a surprise to anyone who knows my leanings to all things Mac and Linux. My interest comes from wanting to do more with two key projects:
- OpenSim – yep, OpenSim is written in C#, and runs on .Net or Mono
- Unity – the scripting languages for Unity (JavaScript, C#, and Boo) run on top of Mono, and access underlying .Net libraries. I also love the idea of Embedding Mono for other projects.
In the category of “well, if I need to go back to…”:
- Java - I have not done new java code since 1996! I would not want to work on client side java at this point (who is doing applets at this point?) — I would be into the whole Eclipse + server side angle (I’ve worked a bit with Weblogic and Presto) Java has so many technologies associated with it at this point, that it is hard to know where to jump in.
- Flash / AS3 - I have not touched flash much since 2005. I think HTML5 + JS + CS3 is the way forward. I do like ActionScript, which is a close cousin of JavaScript. When I dealt with AS2, I had one entry point on the first frame and used a lot of classes. I didnt do the snippets attached to the timeline deal. My leaning is that I could back into flash again for a specific project, but there are many other things I’d like to learn first
- C / C++ – It’s been forever ;)
Content Management Systems
Ok, which to learn? Drupal? Joomla? Wordpress?
NoSQL / SMAQ
I’ve been reading a lot about NoSQL, and just came across this article about SMAQ (Storage, MapReduce and Query)
What to learn? Hadoop? CouchDB? Cassandra? Voldemort? etc…
Besides Programming
It’s obvious I am interested in a wide swath of the programming side.
Now, if someone were to ask me what I would do besides programming, I would say photography, writing, or possibly speaking / demoing.
The other big interest of mine is multimedia. I know a bit, but wish I could just dive into
it for a year and learn a lot more. Some apps I would like to know would be:
Logic Studio
Final Cut Studio
PhotoShop CS5
Maya / 3DS Max / Blender
A lot of the output of this would be directed towards work in Virtual Worlds (assets in
a Unity project, as one example)
(in other words, I know a bit of the creative side, and wish I had the time/money/chance to
really learn a lot more of it)
Anyways, to sum up, I’m interested in a lot, but every situation wants different skill sets. Hard to know where to focus!
Posted in Daniel, Musing, Tech, WebTech | 4 Comments »