August 16, 2006
If all goes well, I ought to have a job by the end of next week. I've narrowed my choices down to around four; more on that in the next jobhunt update.
Thus begins my countdown to employment. Most people would spend their final days of freedom being a bum at home or going out with friends (although this is impossible for me since all of my friends are already employed). But I am determined to make the most out of this opportunity to learn a few things that I might be able to use at work.
My current to-do list is as follows:
Thus begins my countdown to employment. Most people would spend their final days of freedom being a bum at home or going out with friends (although this is impossible for me since all of my friends are already employed). But I am determined to make the most out of this opportunity to learn a few things that I might be able to use at work.
My current to-do list is as follows:
- Read up on agile software development. Martin Fowler's articles are a good resource; also check out this article for a good overview (with parts 2 and 3). So far, I am a believer. I've done some Extreme Programming before (as an elective) but I never really saw the light before because our instructor was such a pain.
- Learn Ruby on Rails. There's a lot of buzz going around that it's ten times faster to develop a website on RoR; my goal is to separate the hype from reality. From what I hear, it's probably that much faster when compared to PHP, but I'm an ASP.NET person so I'll be coming from a different background. Good tutorial here and an e-book here. I haven't experimented much with it so all I've learned so far is that Microsoft makes the best documentation in the world and that open source communities don't put as much effort.
- Watch Ouran High School Host Club. 13 episodes lined up. Hey, who says I can't bum around just a little?
I have an ebook of Practices of an Agile Developer from The Pragmatic Programmers. It's a good book.
I also have RoR ebooks.
Checkout SoftiesOnRails. They were .NET developers who moved to RoR. They even created an RoR IDE written in .NET.
Ah, employment! The end of summer vacations, Christmas breaks, and religious holidays. :) The start of financial independence as well.