4 ms·
What to do when you are waiting
- nostrademons 19y agoI did some of these, wish I'd done some of the others, and have one more to add: 12. Hone your technical skills, particularly in the area you hope to be working in. When I joined my employer, I figured I'd make sure I gave them 2 years of solid work, then I'd start doing side-projects and if it looked like one of them had promise, I'd quit and pursue it. So I purposely did my best to work on absolutely commercially useless stuff for the first year. I learned a whole lot about compilers, a whole lot about type systems and purely functional data structures, a whole lot about Haskell and Scheme, but very little about dynamic languages or the libraries available for them. I got some practical knowledge from my job, but it turned out to be less transferable than I'd hoped for. As a result, when a friend came knocking with "Hey, you wanna start a startup" after only a year, I was far less familiar with the technology we'd be using than I would've liked. I was pretty fluent in two webapp technologies (PHP and JSF) that I knew I didn't want to use, but didn't have much practical experience in Rails or the Python frameworks that I did want to use. And knowing how to design and implement a programming language doesn't do too much good when you just want to use one.
- far33d 19y ago>And knowing how to design and implement a programming language doesn't do too much good when you just want to use one. Knowing that stuff is always useful.