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Some starting topics In September last year I was leaving my job and starting a sabbatical year, with many plans for what seemed then like a lot of time in which to do everything. I was severely underestimating my ability to waste time. Now the year is almost over and I need to start thinking about the technologies in my field of choice that I need to catch up with; and, boy, there is a lot of them! I leave the IT industry alone for one year and kaboom! it blows up like an angry volcano. To be honest, not all of these things that are new for me are just one year old, some I was just ignoring as I didn't need them for my various jobs. Learn from this, as especially in the software business it gets harder and harder to keep up to date and easier and easier to live in a bubble of your own or your employer's creation.

This post is about a list of programming topics that I would like to learn or at least learn to recognize. It's work in progress and probably I will update it for a time. While on my break I created a folder of software development stuff that I would "leave for later". As you can imagine, it got quite large. Today I am opening it for the first time. Be afraid. Be very afraid. I also have a lot of people, either friends or just casual blog or Twitter followings, that constantly let me know of what they are working on. As such, the list will not be very structured, but will be large. Let's begin.

A simple list would look like this. Let me set the list style to ordered list so you can count them:
  1. Typescript 2
  2. ReactJS
  3. JSX
  4. SignalR
  5. Javascript ES6
  6. Xamarin
  7. PhoneGap
  8. Ionic
  9. NodeJS
  10. .NET Core
  11. ASP.Net MVC
  12. R
  13. Python
  14. Unity
  15. Tensorflow
  16. DMTK/CNTK
  17. Visual Studio Code
  18. Jetbrains Project Rider
  19. npm
  20. Bower
  21. Docker
  22. Webpack
  23. Kubernetes
  24. Deep Learning
  25. Statistics
  26. Data mining
  27. Cloud computing
  28. LESS
  29. SASS
  30. CSSX
  31. Responsive design
  32. Multiplatform mobile apps
  33. Blockchains
  34. Parallel programming
  35. Entity Framework
  36. HTML5
  37. AngularJS 2
  38. Cryptography
  39. OpenCV
  40. ZeroNet
  41. Riffle
  42. Bots
  43. Slack
  44. OAuth
  45. OData
  46. DNS
  47. Bittorrent
  48. Roslyn
  49. Universal Windows Platform / Windows 10 development
  50. Katana
  51. Shadow DOM
  52. Serverless architecture
  53. D3 and D4 (d3-like in ReactJs)
  54. KnockoutJs
  55. Caliburn Micro
  56. Fluent Validation
  57. Electron

Yup, there are more than 50 general concepts, major frameworks, programming languages, tools and what not, some of them already researched but maybe not completely. That is not including various miscellaneous small frameworks, pieces of code, projects I want to study or things I want to do. I also need to prioritize them so that I can have at least the semblance of a study plan. Being July 21st, I have about one full month in which to cover the basic minimum. Clearly almost two subjects a day every day is too ambitious a task. Note to self: ignore that little shrieky voice in your head that says it's not!

Being a .NET developer by trade I imagine my next job will be in that area. Also, while I hate this state of affairs, notice there is nothing related to WPF up there. The blogs about the technology that I was reading a few years ago have all dried up, with many of those folks moving to the bloody web. So, I have to start with:

  1. ASP.Net MVC Core - the Model View Controller way of making .NET web applications, I've worked with it, but I am not an expert, as I need to become. Some quickly googled material:
  2. .NET Core - the new version of .NET, redesigned to be cross platform. There is no point of learning .NET Core as standalone: it will be used all over this plan
  3. Entity Framework Core - honestly, I've moved away from ORMs, but clearly Microsoft is moving full steam ahead on using EF everywhere, so I need to learn it well. As resources, everything written or recommended by Julie Lerman should be good, but a quick google later:
  4. OData - an OASIS standard that defines a set of best practices for building and consuming RESTful APIs. When Microsoft adopts an open standard, you pretty much know it will enter the common use vocabulary as a word used more often than "mother". Some resources:
  5. OAuth - An open protocol to allow secure authorization in a simple and standard method from web, mobile and desktop applications. It is increasingly used as "the" authentication method, mostly because it allows for third party integration with Facebook, Twitter, Google and other online identity providers. Some resources:
  6. Typescript 2 - a strict superset of JavaScript from Microsoft, it adds optional static typing and class-based object-oriented programming to the language. Javascript is great, but you can use it in any way you want. There is no way to take advantage of so many cool features of modern IDEs like Visual Studio + ReSharper without some sort of structure. I hope Typescript provides that for me. Resources:
  7. NodeJS - just when I started liking Javascript as a programming language, here comes NodeJs and brings is everywhere! And that made me like it less. Does that make sense? Anyway, with Microsoft tools needing NodeJs for various reasons, I need to look into it. Resources:
  8. Javascript ES6 - the explosion of Javascript put a lot of pressure on the language itself. ECMAScript6 is the newest iteration, adding support for a lot of features that we take for granted in more advanced languages, like classes, block variable scope, lambdas, multiline literals, better regular expressions, modules, etc. I intend to rewrite my browser extension in ES6 Javascript for version 3, among other things. Here are some resources:
  9. npm - npm is a package installer for Javascript. Everybody likes to use it so much that I believe it will soon become an antipattern. Functions like extracting the left side of a string, for example, are considered "packages".
  10. Bower - Bower is a package manager for the web, an attempt to maintain control over a complex ecosystem of web frameworks and libraries and various assets.
  11. Docker - The world’s leading software containerization platform - I don't even know what that means right now - Docker is a tool that I hear more and more about. In August I will even attend an ASP.Net Core + Docker presentation by a Microsoft guy.
  12. Parallel programming - I have built programs that take advantage of parallel programming, but never in a systematic way. I usually write stuff as a single thread, switching to multithreaded work to solve particular problems or to optimize run time. I believe that I need to write everything with parallelism in mind, so I need to train myself in that regard.
  13. Universal Windows Platform - frankly, I don't even know what it means. I am guessing something that brings application development closer to the mobile device/store system, which so far I don't enjoy much, but hey, I need to find out at least what the hell this is all about. The purpose of this software platform is to help develop Metro-style apps that run on both Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile without the need to be re-written for each. Resources:
  14. HTML5 - HTML5 is more than a simple rebuttal of the XHTML concept and the adding of a few extra tags and attributes. It is a new way of looking at web pages. While I've used HTML5 features already, I feel like I need to understand the entire concept as a whole.
  15. Responsive design - the bane of my existence was web development. Now I have to do it so it works on any shape, size or DPI screen. It has gone beyond baneful; yet every recruiter seems to have learned the expression "responsive design" by heart and my answer to that needs to be more evolved than a simple "fuck you, too!"
  16. LESS and SASS - CSS is all nice and functional, but it, just like HTML and Javascript, lacks structure. I hope that these compilable-to-CSS frameworks will help me understand a complex stylesheet like I do a complex piece of code.
  17. AngularJS 2 - I hear that Angular 2 is confusing users of Angular 1! which is funny, because I used Angular just for a few weeks without caring too much about it. I've read a book, but I forgot everything about it. Probably it is for the best as I will be learning the framework starting directly with version 2.

So there you have it: less than 20 items, almost two days each. Still bloody tight, but I don't really need to explore things in depth, just to know what they are and how to use them. The in-depth learning needs to come after that, with weeks if not months dedicated to each.

What about the rest of 35 items? Well, the list is still important as a reference. I intend to go through each, however some of the concepts there are there just because I am interested in them, like DNS, Riffle, Bitcoin and Bittorrent, not because they would be useful at my job or even my current side projects. Data mining and artificial intelligence is a fucking tsunami, but I can't become an expert in something like this without first becoming a beginner, and that takes time - in which the bubble might burst, heh heh. Mobile devices are all nice and cool, but the current trend is for tablets to remain a whim, while people divide their experience between laptops and big screen smartphones. The web takes over everything and I dread that the future is less about native apps and more about web sites. What are native mobile apps for? Speed and access to stuff a browser doesn't usually have access to. Two years and a new API later and a web page does that better. APIs move faster nowadays and if they don't, there are browser extensions that can inject anything and work with a locally installed app that provides just the basic functionality.

What do you think of my list? What needs to be added? What needs to be removed? Often learning goes far smoother when you have partners. Anyone interested in going through some subjects and then discuss it over a laptop and a beer?

Wish me luck!

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