Table of contents
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, especiallyRDF/SPARQL, perhaps leveraging theTalisplatform for this. Also interested in leveragingFreebase
Current effort
I keep struggling with focus, and keep telling myself to simply things, but that's not happening is it. Things keep changing, but the current plan is to learn some basic Java (get a sense of the syntax and the structure) and then jump into Hadoop with Cascading and Ruby with Rails and Sinatra. At some point I'd like to learn Clojure, but I will hold off on that since I have so much to learn anyway. Won't learn anything else for now (i.e. no Javascripts, no other stuff).
This is where I'd like to end up
- Languages: Ruby, Clojure, Java
- Web Framework: Rails, Sinatra
- Computing: Hadoop with Cascading (perhaps driven by Clojure and/or JRuby). Plan to play with Ruby-based streaming as well
Deployment options
Perhaps the other fascinating aspect of programming and application development is the number of deployment choices. I am thinking about using Heroku for my Rails centric stuff, using EC2 directly for a number of projects, and have some properties on Slicehost (which I need to do a better job with).
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