Winter downtime

Part of being a full time soft­ware con­sul­tant is deal­ing with the down­time. When you spe­cial­ize in such a spe­cific niche as I do, you are bound to have spells where there is noth­ing really to do except mar­ket your­self. Despite this being a full time con­sul­tant gives you the power to approach what Nigel Marsh was seek­ing in his Work — Life bal­ance TED talk. Luck­ily for the last few years my down­times have been align­ing pretty closely to the worst win­ter months here (Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary) so I have been spared com­mut­ing dur­ing bliz­zards for two years in a row. I ramp up on a pretty excit­ing project on Mon­day so I guess today is offi­cially the end of my win­ter downtime.

The key I have found to sur­viv­ing down­time is “catch­ing up”. There are mil­lions of things that one needs to catch up on espe­cially when it comes to tech­nol­ogy. There is the bor­ing catch­ing up, like finally set­ting up my blog and using this domain for some­thing more than a MX record, but still its an achieve­ment to finally have some­thing here again after all these years. But the fun parts of catch­ing up are awe­some. Finally my per­sonal Wiki is now up to date as my devel­op­ment toolkit. All the tools, wis­dom and infor­ma­tion I gath­ered in work­ing on two huge e-commerce sites in 2010 (virginmobile.ca and west49.com) are all doc­u­mented and safe from my unre­li­able memory.

But the real joy comes in get­ting an oppor­tu­nity for unbri­dled exper­i­men­ta­tion with new tech­nolo­gies. Its the joy of mak­ing toys. In this two weeks, I have finally had a chance to get node.js run­ning and start learn­ing all that is it about. For some rea­son server side Javascript is very excit­ing to me. Javascript is as amaz­ing as it is flawed. Given that I stuck with PHP all through the Python and Ruby waves in the last decade or so, I haven’t ever had a chance to exper­i­ment with the new server tech­nol­ogy on the scene. This time it is dif­fer­ent. Now I am already very famil­iar with the lan­guage itself and already love it. I just have to see what I can do with it on the server side. Tons of lit­tle ideas are brew­ing in my head.

What I haven’t got­ten to in the last two months includes start­ing to play with Arduino. I really want to start tin­ker­ing with Arduino in my spare time. The sim­ple bridge between the vir­tual world of soft­ware and the phys­i­cal world of mat­ter is very very tempt­ing. Also next on the list of things to look into is Erlang, but less so. A lan­guage that has such robust­ness built into is very intriguing.  But it will prob­a­bly have to wait until I am done exper­i­ment­ing with node.js and CouchDB.

All in all a very pro­duc­tive win­ter downtime.