Ask Slashdot: How Will You Update Your Technical Skills Inventory This Summer?

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?"

Comments

Marketing babble galore

[Lunix Nutcase]

This Ask Slashdot sponsored by: Dice.com.

Re:Marketing babble galore

[foniksonik]

Looks like a question from a high school student to me. Maybe answer it appropriately?

Ajax is still heavily used in web dev but typically you use a wrapper library like Jquery, Dojo or similar.

HTML5 isn't really a skill or a technology. It's a buzzword to describe a set of HTML extensions, CSS extensions and the way you combine them with JavaScript.

XCode is an IDE to develop Objective-C applications for iOS and OSX operating systems.

These are fine if you have something in mind. If not might I suggest the following.

Read a book on Design Patterns and get a cookbook for your favorite language (JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP, C++, LUA, etc) that uses said patterns (factory, decorator, etc).

Try making a game using a game engine such as Unity or Unreal.

Buy a $25 Arduino board and find some tutorials on programming for it.

If it must be web related, try out NodeJS and use Meteor framework to build an app.

HTML5, XCODE, and AJAX

[Ignacio]

Those are not skills for this summer, those are skills for several summers ago.

Re:HTML5, XCODE, and AJAX

[mysidia]

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 :)

Vodka mostly

[decipher_saint]

to kill off the slow brain cells that are holding me back from synergizing my knowledge of vertically integrated mobile platforms in local cloud-based content management system datafication.

Re:Assembly Language

[slew]

Im learning assembly language. It will never become obsolete unlike some high level languages.

Nah, go for the metal, I'm learning binary this summer...

0, 1, ok now time for some fun in the sun... ;^)

This summer I'll learn how to dream in code

[Spy Handler]

that way I can get all my work done while I sleep

Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert

[Anonymous Coward]

I will be re-reading MSCE course materials. Sometimes I forget where to click.

Mercenary outlook

[Okian Warrior]

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.)