Caffeinated Coder

Here is a list of what I would most like to learn in the coming year.

1. StructureMap – This is the one new technology that I will likely be able to implement at work in the first quarter, so I made it first on my list. I’ve been using the Dependency Injection pattern on an almost daily basis over the last six months as a way to make our codebase more testable, but I still haven’t taken the time to learn and start incorporating an IoC Container. Up until recently I had planned on using Windsor since I managed to make it through a few tutorials on it last year, but Jeremy Miller has given StructureMap so much attention lately in terms of a enhancements and documentation that I decided to try it instead.
2. JQuery & QUnit– I only recently joined the rest of the world when it comes to using ajax and modern javascript frameworks while I was working on my recent Rails side project (I do mostly middle-tier and back-end development). I used Prototype simply because it was the default for Rails, but now I’m ready to try the much hyped JQuery framework along with QUnit, the unit testing framework that goes with it. Since I tend to learn much better when I have a concrete task, I’m going to start by re-implementing all of the Prototype functionality in my Rails app in JQuery.
3. MVC Framework – I doubt I’ll have the opportunity to use this at work anytime soon since switching an existing project from WebForms to the MVC Framework would be a major rewrite. However now that I have a pretty good grounding in an MVC framework (RoR), I’m curious to see how the new Microsoft version compares.
4. IronRuby – I’m also excited to see what the IronRuby experience is like compared with RoR. The RoR stack has been criticized in the past for poor performance and limited API and IDE support, so I’m anxious to see whether running Ruby on the DLR will be the answer to these problems or whether it will just seem like a cheap knock-off of the original.
5. Git and\or Mercurial – I finally graduated to Subversion this last year, so now it is time to challenge myself with a distributed source control system. There’s no way we would go through another upgrade at work anytime soon, but it will be fun to experiment with these tools on personal projects.
6. Django – I don’t have plans of doing any real development in Python or Django, but a friend of mine swears that this is way better than Rails, so I’m curious enough to at least go through some tutorials and sample projects so that I can decide for myself.
7. Erlang – I’m going to finally try a functional language this year. I mean it this time. Really…
8. Lambda Expressions – I can fumble my way through samples, but I want to ratchet up my understanding a few levels so that I can naturally incorporate this C# 3.0 goodness into my daily development.
9. PowerShell (again) – I dug into this technology pretty deep about a year and a half ago when I first started this blog and even gave a couple presentations to user groups on the topic. Unfortunately, I fell victim to the ‘use it or loose it’ phenomenon and struggled mightily to do even the simplest of tasks during a recent automation project. Nevertheless, I was reminded about how cool this product was and got inspired to relearn it and start trying to use it on a regular basis this time around.
10. Ubuntu – Finally, it’s been far too long since I’ve played with a flavor of Linux. With VM’s I really have no excuse anymore.

I guess I’d better quit writing and get started…

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