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A New Year...A New Month...A New Technology...

I have (first correction - thanks Matt!) been pulling together links for a larger "start of the year" post and decided to scale it back and try something a bit different. The various sites that AKSEL manages will be going through a "re-branding" exercise in the near future but one of my goals this year is to follow Chris Brogan's Three Words idea (Freedom. Consistency. Communication - I'm still deciding...) as well as working in some of Mark Riffey's ideas into my weekly schedule.

Rod Paddock asked "What's in a title" - and pointed out that one thing developers can do to become better developers is to adopt more agile practices - and he lists several practices and his experience with them.

That's a great goal for developers but what about "database developers"? There are lots of developers out there but almost every role needs to be qualified further: web developer, application developer, database developer. Are there other qualifications that are needed?

A regular Windows application developer likely doesn't need to know about CSS - but a web developer better know CSS. Does a database developer have to know the normal forms? Or maybe how to design a database properly?

How do you qualify that? Because there are always exceptions to each rule.

One of the ways I'm starting this year is by taking a new technology each month and really exposing myself to it (insert joke here). What's my guideline? I'm not completely sure but my first technology (MVC) is something that is actually fairly broad - popularized with Ruby on Rails, "foxified" with FoxTrails and DotNetted with ASP MVC.

How do *you* plan to become a better developer?

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Eric Selje said…
I finally joined IEEE Computer Society (computer.org) for $99, which give me access to Safari Online and a TON of training videos. I'm looking forward to retraining myself with some new technologies.
January 12, 2009 at 10:28 AM
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