Tue, 03 Feb 2009

Things to Learn

It turns out that there are a log of things that need to be learned when you do my job. And as far as I can tell, there is no end in site. So I thought I'd make a little list of things that I'm sort of embarrassed that I don't really know and see how much of it I'm still ignorant of or embarrassed by in six months, a year, five years.

  1. SQL. Yeah, I took a course. The content dribbled out too slowly for me to pay attention. I assume that at some point someone will say "go handle this database issue for us" and I'll finally take the time to learn it.
  2. Linear Algebra. Yeah, This is a special case of "math". Really I could just put 'Math' here and it wouldn't be far wrong.
  3. Javascript. Funny story. I'm actually learning it for a project at work right now. Unfunny part? Almost no HTML/CSS interaction. So really, a very limited form of Javascript.
  4. Parsing technology. Well, beyond recursive descent. You know, Lex/Yacc style parsing. Dragon-book parsing. You know, the hard stuff. ;)
  5. Operating systems. That course that they make you take? I didn't get a chance to take it. I took advanced networking instead. Life is trade-offs.
  6. Assembly. Presumably x86. I've made a few half-hearted stabs, but nothing ever really stuck.

I'll add to this doc as I remember more things, but I'll publish now. I've been doing a lot of thinking about learning in my profession recently, and I suspect it'll be the source of a number of entries.

posted at: 08:17 | path: /Learns | comments/permalink