I second the much mentioned idea of building timeless/technology independent skills. For example, use pure SQL as much as possible in your T-SQL procedures - t

I second the much mentioned idea of building timeless/technology independent skills. For example, use pure SQL as much as possible in your T-SQL procedures - this experience will transfer nicely to Postgres, Oracle, DB2, etc. Course, you'll have to convince employers that it transfers, but techies will know if you speak it or not. Experiment with small pieces when you can. I'm working on learning a bit about REST programming with Ruby for a small web app/service I'm deploying at work. For someone who has been a back-end code guy, playing with the web frontend is . . . interesting.