That’s right, I’m setting goals for 2013 on the last day of the third quarter. But my current status warrants the urgency. I have been a PHP developer since I started at The Nerdery exactly 6 years ago this month. Within the first few months I learned Zend Framework (version 1.0.2 at the time). I have developed all of my projects since then in Zend Framework. In doing that I have come to be somewhat of a Zend Framework expert.
In addition to being involved in over 400 projects I have also taken on more of a management role as a Principal Software Engineer (PSE). I am now leading a team of 7 other PSEs. Our team is in charge of recruiting, mentoring developers, helping with sales and resourcing needs, and defining and enforcing standards, among other things. Doing all of these non-development things, along with my focus on Zend Framework 1, has caused me to miss 6 years of changes in web development.
Now with Zend Framework 1.x being sunsetted in 2014 and Zend Framework 2 being released, which at first blush feels very foreign to me, I find myself at a cross-road. I can either continue to float further and further away from actual programming and focus on management and project leadership, or dive back in and reintroduce myself to the new stuff.
Without further ado, here’s my list of technologies that I want to learn by the end of 2013:
- Groovy on Grails
- OpenStack, or other virtualization environments
- Vagrant + Puppet/Chef
- Varnish
- Javascript MVC (Backbone, RequireJS, Underscore, Grunt)
- MongoDB
- Solr
- Symfony2
- Node.js
- .Net MVC
Hmm, that’s a pretty long list. I probably won’t get to all of them by the end of the year. But if I can stay focused I will hopefully be able to reap the benefits by being more effective at my job and assuring my long-term career opportunities in the industry. I hope my friends and colleagues can hold me to it and help me achieve this goal.