A Person, Artist, Software Engineer, Geologist.

I'm only human.  I make plenty of mistakes. Early in my career I thought that mistakes where to be avoided.  I rock climbed and mistakes could be at best scary.  In software development the mistakes I made were to be quickly forgotten as I was learning so fast I needed to focus on what I was doing.  Many of my mistakes were because of the fast pace of learning systems, languages, libraries and the like.  The software world was so large and I wanted to learn as much as possible. I no longer try to know everything.  I just need to know just enough. Now days I cherish watching and understanding how mistakes are made (including my own).  Many of my mistakes now days are still due to incomplete understanding of an issue., but it's far less than it used to be.  I now take time to think before deciding if I have enough information to provide valuable input.  I've also adopted the fortunate habit of asking what I call stupid questions.  Th...

I was reading a post on SlashDot.org this week about a developer asking what language they should learn next to further their professional career.  The poster then stated the languages they would not learn because of personal stances dealing with the languages parent company, political stance or whatever. What an interesting but self limiting point of view. For me, I can't really care or direct which language I develop with, other than to work for a company that generally uses the languages I'm interested in.   If the job and problems are interesting then the language is maybe not as important as what I'm learning.  I'm excluding the choices of using Perl for client side applications or XUL for business logic type of decisions.  I'm talking about sound business decisions by the company for selecting a toolset for a specific project. My job is providing a product for the company with the toolset I have.  If I can do this and a fellow developer is always arg...