Smorgasbord

At my previous job, I used a number of technologies: C++, C#, and Perl. There were other things such as PVCS, MS Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Sharepoint), and a little bit of ActiveDirectory and NTFS rights.

When I took this leap, part of my motivation was to move to other technologies. I felt that open source tech had a bright future and I wanted to be prepared to use it. (And I still feel that way.)

At home, I've been working with a number of technologies, learning how they work. They include:

 - Ruby

 - Ruby on Rails

 - MySQL

 - Java

 - Eclipse

 - Apache

I have been bouncing from one to another. I have not had the time (nor the inclination) to sit down with one technology and slog through it, day after day. (I've also used part of my time for networking and job searches.) Bouncing from one technology to another is a new concept for me -- the job had very specific goals and deadlines, so focus was important.

As I look back, I'm thinking that focus was not that important in the past few weeks. Instead, I needed to verify that I was capable of exploring these different technologies. That verification meant running small experiments and sometimes downloading things.

I set out with a bunch of ideas for new tech. I think I have demonstrated to myself that I have the tools to learn them. While there is more tech (iPod development, Twitter) that could be fun, I think I have a good set to work with. I think I can start to focus on some specific tech. (Not that I want to slog.)