DerekMartin.ca web development, spirituality, UFOs & the occult

The Passionate Programmer

I'm about half way through reading this book, and it's great. The sub-title is "creating a remarkable career in software development". Author Chad Fowler makes it seem so obvious: figure out what you don't really know, and dive into it. Easier said than done, for sure, but he asks the right questions along the way, and it gets you thinking about what you don't know. It gets you inspired.

People often ask me "How do you keep up with everything? The internet changes so quickly!"
The answer is that it's easy, IF you love learning.

Here's my current "to learn & do" list, in no particular order:

• HTML5
• CSS3
• Review Scrum/XP/Agile (i already know some but i'm rusty)
• PHP 5.3's new features: namespaces, closures/lambdas
• Memcached
• jQuery
• webhooks
• CouchDB/TokyoCabinet
• Read the source of core Zend Framework components
• Investigate parts of the Zend Studio 7 IDE that I don't normally use
• Read "The The Ten Day MBA" and "O'Reilly's Restful Web Services"
• Read the entire PHPUnit Manual, and start writing 1 test per day
• Finally really learn Regular Expressions (regex)
• Do all 21 of Dave Thomas' Code Kata
• Finally read the Gang of Four's canonical book, "Design Patterns"