Ask Slashdot: How Will You Update Your Technical Skills Inventory This Summer? 208
Proudrooster writes "As technologists, developers, and programmers it is essential to keep moving forward as technology advances so that we do not find ourselves pigeonholed, irrelevant, or worse, unemployed. If you had to choose a new technology skill to add to your personal inventory this summer, what would it be and why? Also, where would you look for the best online training (iTunesU, Lynda.com)? The technologies that immediately jump out as useful to me are HTML5, XCODE, and AJAX. How about you?"
None of these fads (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't care about web technologies and fads which will last 2 years.
I will continue to expand my skills in C, C++, cross-development infrastructure, build tools, SOC firmware support, device drivers, build infrastructure management, Linux, compilers, and similar stuff.
With these skills, I will still have a good job in 20 years, because most newbies are terrified of the middleware guts, because it's the hardest part, and everything is built on top of it, so it can't go away.
Once all the AJAX experts are out of work in 15 years, I'll still be making a living writing C.
Re:HTML5, XCODE, and AJAX (Score:5, Interesting)
Those are not skills for this summer, those are skills for several summers ago.
Agreed...
Learn yourself some HTML6, haXe, Zimbu, Opa, F#, Rails 4.0 (released a few days ago), CoffeeScript, Google Dart, Ceylon, , Django 1.5, MS Excel, 'R', Dao,Hadoop, MongoDB, C# 4.0, Python 3,
Not. More seriously: go buy some books on cooking, and learn that, or find some other hobby that fancies you -- maybe remotely leveraging skills from your technical job, maybe not. Learn some new hobbies -- have fun; concentrate on gratitude. Happy people are more successful. Don't worry about competing with other people for "knowledge of the latest fad".
Try to figure out which worldly subject is important, but that you know the least about -- read a book or two on it. To have depth of knowledge; reading a book isn't good enough, you need lots of experience to learn -- if you don't do a lot of programming in the language, you won't learn it very well.
On the other hand, you can expand breadth of knowledge into other subjects such as History or Art, by reading, and doing a little ---- the weaker you are in a subject, the easier it is to learn a meaningful amount
The fewer subjects you are that weak in.... well, the more global intelligence you will have :)
Mercenary outlook (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems a rather mercenary outlook to me. You are asking for suggestions on how to spend your spare time with the goal of keeping yourself employed, without regard to whether you would enjoy the subject or process.
I'm all for goal-driven careers, but studies show that the most successful people are the ones who like what they do. It largely doesn't matter whether the skill is the most "in demand", it only matters whether the skill is in demand "enough". This is illustrated by successful people in (what we would consider) pedestrian careers such as furniture sales, property rental, or owning the local laundromat (which, BTW, is the most common way to be successful).
The first step is discovering what you enjoy. The easiest way to do this is to spend 1 hour in quiet solitude. This is unexpressibly difficult if you've never tried it - you need a situation which has no interruptions whatsoever (kids, phone calls, other people), and you need to stick with it for the duration. Solo long road trips, long walks, hiking, and biking work well for this.
For the first 1/2 hour your head will be full of day-to-day thoughts, reminders, personal maintenance, reviewing memories, and so on. After awhile, this will quiet down and your mind will start to wander. Whatever you think about most is likely your source of joy.
Figure out some skill that feeds into your joy, choose a project that requires this skill and which also feeds into joy, and resolve to complete the project by the end of summer. Write the goal down (this part is important!) with as much detail as you can, stick it in an envelope, and put it away for later.
Your brain has likes and dislikes, as well as a goal-setting mechanism that you can use to your advantage. If you want to be happy, you should start the process of being happy right now, while you still have leisure to do so.
(Oh, and to answer your question: I'm writing a paper on hard AI.)