Programming

Dec 27, 2009: This has been rebooted for 2010

I haven't written meaningful code since 2004, and that was all in Fortran or Perl.  In those days programming was a necessary evil, and while my ability to program got me my first job, it was never something I enjoyed.  Now that I don't need to write code for a living, programming is fascinating, and I regret stepping away (and trying to get back in has proved to be harder than expected).  Part of the reason is that I would love to be able to at least try some of my own ideas out myself.  The other part is that programming has become very interesting, especially with the evolution of data driven apps and web-scale computing.  In particular, I would like to get a decent hang of processing large quantities of data and trying to look at web-based approaches to making that data available.  To get there, some of the things I would like to do are

• Get really good with Ruby and decent with Rails and Sinatra
• Get familiar with distributed data and data processing.  Since Hadoop and a lot of it's ecosystem is Java based, have decided to learn some Java, although most of my work will probably be done using Ruby and other non-Java approaches
• Somewhat related to that is the thought of writing highly concurrent, scalable, distributed code for scientific computing.  Originally, I was planning to go with Erlang, but decided that since I kept running into Java and the JVM, Clojure makes a lot of sense
• Get more familiar with basic Ajax principles/get into Javascript although I am not sure I'll ever get the time
• Would love to get familiar with the Semantic Web stack, especially RDF/SPARQL, perhaps leveraging the Talis platform for this.  Also interested in leveraging Freebase