As good a place as any to reiterate the lesson learned from one of the most formative books of my early years - Future Shock. After detailing the degree to which the *rate* of change was accelerating ( and this was in 1970 ) the Tofflers made the point that whatever you were studying in college, it would probably be obsolete by the time you graduated. The only thing you could be really certain of was that things were going to change - faster and faster - so if you wanted to get good at something, it would be a really good idea to get good at changing.

Forty years and many careers and obsessions later I am quite grateful i took that advice to heart.



>I can never understand why a programmer bases their career on one technology, and then blows their lid when that technology becomes in low demand. I was taught early to consider myself a technology specialist instead of a .NET programmer. I've been dabbling a little in PHP and I hope to do some Ruby on Rails stuff soon. This ensures I am in the best place possible should .NET skillz become low in demand (which will never happen).
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>I agree, that's a good way to think about it.
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>For all the debates that John Ryan and I have, he's absolutely right on this: it's important to stay productive. That can be difficult sometimes, with so many new tools and only so many hours in a day.
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>Now more than ever, developers have to hedge bets on what areas might be on their radars a year from now.
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>Rod Paddock has (I believe) been spending quite a bit of time with Ruby - maybe he'll be writing or blogging about it, though I can't speak for his time.
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>JB and I have a friend named Don Demsak (also known in the mid-Atlantic as "DonXML") who said something I'll never forget: "If a person isn't learning a new technology or a new major product or version every six months, they're in trouble". The more people are in the process of learning new things, the more they're in synch with the process of learning and the more quickly they'll learn the next time around. But it can be difficult, when it seems like every waking moment is spent doing work to pay the bills. Over the weekend I had to lock myself away from everything for hours and hours because there were aspects of LINQ to XML that I didn't quite get, and needed to get. Left me tired as hell, but I was better off. Sometimes being successful in this industry means putting in doctors-type hours, but not necessarily with the same pay. :)