in the next few months we’re going to be delivering on a really cool Project.
i am not going to mention the name or what we are doing etc, because i think it is still a “secret”.
part of the process for the Project is that we need to decide on a technology/technologies that will we use in delivering what the Business needs (aka wants).

the hard part about making such decisions is that they tend to be biased by your own experience or preferences. a very real example of this would be: “let’s use Python for the system because it is … (you can fill in your own reason here)”.
The bottom line is, i have recommended a more conservative route with a combination of technologies namely PHP for the client applications and C# for the server applications - thankfully so far this has been accepted and recognised as a good choice based on the type of problems that we are going to be facing - so i am stoked.

but, there is an issue that is lingering in the back of my mind. have i recommend these technologies because i am comfortable with solving problems with them ? do i need to pull finger and really get to know another language, so that i can become a more well rounded technologist / developer / solution designer ? ell the answer to both these questions is a definite yes, which has scared me quite a bit.

i have been working for nearly 10 years in the technology sector, and if i look back at how i was in the early days , there was a definite hunger to learn as much as possible. i was more comfortable making a wrong choice then, than i am now – probably because I had not experience of burning my fingers yet. ut after that self reflection i have needed to decide what the next step is going to be. easy - learn Python. if there is a requirement or a project or a problem that will be suited for this language then i need to have the answers and i need to have at least written some ‘hello world’ type apps. more than that i need to foster the idea that you can always improve yourself.

but where to start ? i have been thinking about a nice little challenge over the past couple of weeks which is - how do you insert 100k records into a db in the fastest possible time. i have managed to go from about 50secs down to about 5secs, so i am quite happy with myself in that regard, but i still feel that this can be improved upon, and this would be a nice problem to solve in another language. why? well, the solution touches on threading, data structures and some design patterns which i think will be a nice challenge in a new language. so, over the weeks to come i will start to post some of my findings, code snippets, and general learning’s. have a good week.

*before my editing skills are put into question I should inform you that guy has a thing for e e cummings -admin