VoxBlog

At work we recently hired a couple .Net developers and are busily converting them to Java developers.  During my “what makes a good developer isn’t how well they know the syntax and libraries” and “you need to use the right tools for the job” speeches, I realized how long it has been since I really moved outside my own comfort zone as a developer.

I started life as a Perl coder around 1998 and made the jump to Java in around 2001. I remember how tired I was every night after work, but how great it was to be exposed to completely new concepts and ways of working–even the bad ideas like EJB 1.1.  Since then I have improved and refined my Java library usage (Servlets->Struts->Spring, Torque->JDO->JPA,  etc) but they have all been just evolutions of a similar theme. I realized that for all my talk of “best tool for the job”, I have really been keeping my toolbox limited.

I am a strong believer that you can only really learn a technology by having a real-life project. “Sample” projects help you learn the top layer happy path, but you are never going to really learn the ins and outs of a tool without a real project.

Since a real project to me means a web application and since I am cheap, the Google App Engine (GAE) with Python is a natural fit.  Python is definitely a language that should be learned, GAE is a great exposure to cloud computing, and best of all I can build it all for free.

For the last week, I’ve been working through the sample apps and have begun diving deeper into Python and Django.  So far I have liked what I’ve seen, but however the project turns out, I know it is making me a better developer.