LANLEY

I recently attended a Q&A Session with Martin Fowler. Mr. Fowler is known for many of his tech books, including Refactoring, and Domain Specific Languages. In the talk, there was a piece on being interested in multiple languages. Someone who may be a Front-End developer should be interested in Back-End related work and vice versa. He said:

A good colleague of mine mentioned “Learn a New Language Every Year.” Every developer should strive to learn at least one new language every year. When you do, you can expand your thinking capabilities when solving complex problems…

I wanted to run through my years in this entry. I definitely have some catching up to do!

Before my Career – College

In college, I was a really big C# individual. My final project was in C#, and thought it was the best programming language ever! I definitely enjoyed the concept of OOP, and I wanted to expand on that programming model. It wasn’t until a year later where I landed my first job.

Career

2011

I worked at a consulting company where their clients were predominately finance companies. Got a chance to work at an Investment Bank in Stamford, CT. This position was all Java. Once I was collecting a paycheck, I had completely forgot about C#.

2012

Still at the same client, but was heavily interested in Test Driven Development. My boss said while testing is useful, it eats up too much time, and he didn’t want to do it in our project. He managed to find a team that would work with me within the company where I was able to write some tests! The team used TestNG. It had a difficult learning curve for me, but I got over it. Testing was fun, but it wasn’t ‘til next year where I got more familiar with TDD. This isn’t a language learning per se, but it was a new (testing) framework.

2013

I joined another consulting company (pattern, much?) that was big on TDD, The Agile Methodology, and Pairing. Here, I had to pick up Ruby, Rails, and learn a little Twitter Bootstrap. I had a lot of fun test driving features with a pair. It was really comfortable to be able to learn good practices, and having someone help get rid of bad habits was also a plus! I definitely enjoyed developing in Ruby.

2014

Sadly enough, 2014 was the same as 2013. Each client I worked on was pretty much a Rails project. I did get better throughout time with TDD which is always helpful.

2015

Here’s where I was forced to switch it up! React was a hot commodity, so I had dived head first into Javascript. That felt difficult, but definitely got over it relatively quick. That includes testing in React using Jasmine. It was a ton of fun! I continue to be working on React at the moment!

2016

As of right now, I’m still at a place that uses React. On my own, I’ve been trying to learn Elixir. Elixir is part of the reason I started this blog. I look forward to what I will be doing with Elixir, but the end of the year is coming up soon!!

According to the quote above, I may have missed 2 languages (2012 and 2014). What’s next for 2017? I don’t know. Any new Languages? Maybe a new framework? We’ll see! One thing is for sure:

Learn a New Language Every Year!

giphy genius homer simpson