Posted by Jim at November 27th, 2005

Now that I’m getting closer to finishing my masters project (and now that I’m starting my own small computer consulting practice), I’ve got to start finding new technical areas to care about instead of having them assigned to me.

I’ve got two basic categories of stuff to think about:
1. Stuff I care about for it’s own sake and have no idea how to make a profit on it. Examples of this would be data mining/warehousing, GIS, beowulf clusters, Grids, and some rather odd little distributed programming ideas I’ve had. Mind you, I know that someone’s making a living off of many of my examples. I just don’t know how I’d get into those myself.
2. Stuff I care about both out of interest and because people pay me to care. Largely this would be web programming/services (C#, Javascript, SQL, PHP, Ruby on Rails, AJAX) or networking (VPN’s and security issues). These are things I’m interested in out of fear as well as love. Basically, I need to keep up with things in these areas or risk not being hired.

A friend of mine once mentioned that he spent an hour a day for personal development, researching new developments in computers and learning new skills. It’s a pretty good idea if you’ve got the necessary persistence.

I wonder whether most computer professionals are that organized about keeping up with technology?