If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today
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If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today
#2I like what he says about learning a new language every year and I sincerely want to do that. However if you're in a Java shop and are learning Ruby/Python on your own, how do you keep from forgetting it. If you don't use it, you lose it right?
Re: If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today
#3I like what he says about learning a new language every year and I sincerely want to do that. However if you're in a Java shop and are learning Ruby/Python on your own, how do you keep from forgetting it. If you don't use it, you lose it right?
I think learning a language that may not be applicable at work has two key benefits:
1. I learn it "enough" to know what it's good at, what it's bad at, and to have enough hand-written code to pick it back up pretty quickly (particularly if you set up a test-driven learning environment)
2. Even when I forget the language's particulars, it changes the way I see other programming languages. For instance, while I don't use Ruby in my day job yet, I still think of things I can do with method_missing and how I might approximate that same power and flexibility in my work where appropriate. In short, learning languages helps me program "into a language" rather than "in a language", to borrow Steve McConnell's terminology.
Re: If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today
#4I like what he says about learning a new language every year and I sincerely want to do that. However if you're in a Java shop and are learning Ruby/Python on your own, how do you keep from forgetting it. If you don't use it, you lose it right?
One option would be to, in your free time, get involved in an open source project that uses the new language. Additionally, that might also help build your reputation and resume quality experience.
Re: If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today
#5I like what he says about learning a new language every year and I sincerely want to do that. However if you're in a Java shop and are learning Ruby/Python on your own, how do you keep from forgetting it. If you don't use it, you lose it right?
He gives two examples in the same article; "Try to use it at work" and "Get involved in an open-source project".
If you're in a java shop and learning Python, have a look at jython and see where you can use it for testing, automation, etc. Even if only for your own local scripts.
Re: If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today
#6The list of things to do seems shortsighted to me. I can't imagine guys like Donald Knuth or Linus Torvalds caring much about agile methods and the new language of every year. I think it's more like a list of things to do that worked for him.
Other than that I agree with the main idea of the article...
Re: If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today
#7The list of things to do seems shortsighted to me. I can't imagine guys like Donald Knuth or Linus Torvalds caring much about agile methods and the new language of every year. I think it's more like a list of things to do that worked for him. Other than that I agree with the main idea of the article...
Guys like Knuth and Torvalds are not primarily concerned with gaining employment, because their resumes are already pretty much at peak impressiveness. There are not many people in their class. The alternative to spending all your time on the project that you're famous for (if, for example, you are not famous...) is to spend time doing some of these things.
Re: If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today
#8I like what he says about learning a new language every year and I sincerely want to do that. However if you're in a Java shop and are learning Ruby/Python on your own, how do you keep from forgetting it. If you don't use it, you lose it right?
Then find ways to use it.
At work, my project is purely C++. But if I have to write a tool for data analysis or to test a subsystem, I'll use C# so I improve my .NET skills. Before,I used Python for that, but C# became more appealing.
Same thing at home. Web projects (of which there are few!) use PHP, everything else is C/Assembly (I do a lot of microcontroller stuff) or C# front ends using Visual Studio Express.
Re: If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today
#9The list of things to do seems shortsighted to me. I can't imagine guys like Donald Knuth or Linus Torvalds caring much about agile methods and the new language of every year. I think it's more like a list of things to do that worked for him. Other than that I agree with the main idea of the article...
Guys like Knuth and Torvalds are not primarily concerned with gaining employment, because their resumes are already pretty much at peak impressiveness. There are not many people in their class. The alternative to spending all your time on the project that you're famous for (if, for example, you are not famous...) is to spend time doing some of these things.
I think people like Knuth, Torvalds, Carmack, etc. are the models for career development. Why would you assume that a strategy that didn't work for any of the biggest guys around would be better for you than theirs?
Re: If You Want a Job Tomorrow, Cultivate Your Career Today
#10I like what he says about learning a new language every year and I sincerely want to do that. However if you're in a Java shop and are learning Ruby/Python on your own, how do you keep from forgetting it. If you don't use it, you lose it right?
The important thing is to learn the concepts and structures that programming languages indirectly talk about.
If you understand the differences between the OO concepts in Java, Ruby and Python, then you'll find it easy enough to pick up the surface layer (the syntax) of the languages.