Starting afresh

4:40pm 31st December, 2011 - Not a particularly bad time to start a new blog, and begin learning a new language. Well, symbolic it's a good time, practically not so much.

In any case this is a new start. After 10 years of back end and web service development it's time to try something new. During this time I've worked as a software engineer, team leader and sales / marketing / product management guy. Throughout it all I've been developing primarily in .Net with sporadic Java phases interspersed.

To be honest, I love .Net. The .Net 4 framework with C#, Visual Studio and Resharper is an elegant and rapid way to build software. Whilst the FOSS crowd might hate to admit it, Microsoft has it over most other languages when it comes to IDE and tooling support.

But all good engineers need more than one string to their bow. This is especially true for .Net enterprise developers. We live in an isolated world clinging to legacy code and outdated standards (like SOAP, ugh). Things are changing and the tide is turning (Windows RT and Metro promise to upset many a boat), but there is still a need to broaden horizons. With this in mind it's time to delve deep into an alien world of web apps, open source software, languages, tools and OS's. I'm hoping that some of the learning's I get from this will be useful to others who are in a similar position.

The only way to learn is by doing. So I will do. My aim over the next 3 months is to learn a new language and framework, namely Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Why? Because it's the golden boy at the moment. I also believe it will be handy to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the framework on which many others are at least partially based.

I have a project in mind as well. A project that incorporates all aspects of a modern application - a simple web interface, a RESTFul API, a back end data store and a native mobile interface. That's a lot in 3 months, but what are we without ambition?