Shawn on the net

I’m a programmer by choice but a DBA/Sysadmin by need.  Thats not to say I don’t really enjoy the other two roles just that I don’t always focus on improving my skills in either as much as I do my development skills.  Given that a larger and larger portion of my work these days revolves around scaling databases and systems I’ve started to focus more on improving this side of my skillset.  This week I’ve started reading High Performance MySql Second Edition.  I’ve only read the first few seconds but already have a long list of notes about things I didn’t know about or worse yet thought I knew about but was wrong about.

I’ll post a full follow up once I’ve completed it but it’s starting out looking really good.

So tonight I started reading Programming Erlang again.  Well I started it last week too.  I’ll probably be starting again next week as well.  I’ve been so busy with work lately that I’ve found it difficult to study anything out of hours.  Assuming I don’t completely fail at concentrating I’ll be sure to post more about my experience.

I did say mostly on track.  I took a break today to give my go at learning Flex 3 and by extension ActionScript 3.  It’s going pretty good.  I have 3 pdf books on it I bought which really came in handy since I’ve been without net access lately.  I am getting the hang of it though and have been playing around with a fun little project to really force me to learn it.

Finished up Section 1 of the Pragmatic Programmers book on RubyCocoa today. Seems pretty interesting. I’ve wanted to get back into desktop development for a while now since I’ve been doing purely web development for a number of years and this seems like a great way to go about it. I’m really enjoying it so far though I’ve only just started and spent about an hour screwing around with the small examples trying different things with them.

Today I started reading SICP.  I’ve been meaning to do it for a long time but just never had the time.  Now that I have free time to work on my own projects and such full time I plan to finally work my way through it.  I worked through the first 17 exercises today.  I don’t think I can maintain this pace but I’m going to schedule it in for an hour of time each day even if it’s just review sessions.  I might make posts here as I go but it won’t be very in depth.  Lots of other people have done much better jobs of that when I would so if you’re interested check out http://www.kendyck.com and http://eli.thegreenplace.net/ who both appear to have excellent info.