Just a few days back , I came across the blog post by Davy Brion on “You Need To Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone” . Well an Excellent article by Davy . David talks about the upside and the downside of his experience and thoughts on
“instead of learning a lot of languages, wouldn’t it better to really focus on one and know it very thoroughly?” .
I too had a similar thought on learning and mastering a single Language .Interestingly C# which is same as Davy Brion .
I understand that i have been working on .NET for some time ( Almost all my College projects were on .NET ) and worked on .NET in couple of Projects too in which i feel .NET is my Comfort Zone .
I was always comfortable working with my best IDE’s ( Visual Studio ) But , in the last 6-8 Months , i got more opportunity to explore on other technologies apart from .NET like Delphi 7,SAP Business One SDK,Crystal Reports VCL for Delphi,Barcode Fonts,Paradox and DBase Database,PHP, Data Modeling etc…
The list of technologies keeps growing and will list them in the coming posts :). Whats surprising is that , although these technologies were not in my Comfort zone when i began working on it , gradually these too came in to my Comfort Zone .
Most of the time , i got an opportunity to explore the problems in the technologies , searched for the possible solutions and solved them.
The important aspect here is that by learning new things , it has helped me to think a bit differently and understand how .NET could have solved the problems when compared with others . Especially when i worked on Delphi 7 ( which was a native Code ) and .NET ( Managed Code ) simultaneously .
And that’s the key right there: the fact that learning about something makes you think different about something you already thought you had a pretty good idea about.
I always make sure that i personally spend some time to upgrade my knowledge on .NET .
With so many technologies and already many of them in my comfort zone . Whats Next ???
I am looking for an Interesting thing to learn like Windows Phone 7 Development , F# , Best Practices on .NET etc and might also start Evangalism too 🙂 , to come out of my yet another comfort zone .
As Davy says “It’s simply a win-win situation.”
3 Comments
in your case stepping out of your comfort zone would be to use Linux/Mac and the tools found there.
Thanks Strockbine …
Hopefully will try that too
It’s cool to learn another language. Somethimes – traits of the work – i get to work on languages I don’t remotely know anything about.
They. “Hey, we need this fixed. It’s a flash on a Java runningw ebsite”.
Me. “Ok… but I don’t know anything about flash nor Java”.
They. “No, but i think that part is run on PHP”
After checking, of course, that part that needed fixing was done in Flash and java!!! 😛
It broadens your mind to try new languages, tho, i love my job. I am currently tempted by ruby. 🙂
Regards,
Pedro