Sunday, October 19, 2008

Fear Factor presentation from Tim Bray

Tim Bray gave a great talk/presentation at FOWA in London titled Fear Factor. In speach he outlined some general tips and strategies for web developers to survive this economic crisis.

He also created series of blog posts starting with "On tough times" that go more in depth to each of his major survival points:

Make sure you read comments on individual posts.

In presentation and later in blog post he mentioned his belif that current cloud computing offers lead to vendor lock-in. There are some very insightful comment on his original post (Get In the Cloud) and the follow up Lockin-Free Cloud? (my comment on the topic)

But my biggest take form his talk was when he talked about old javaEE an php code bases. There will be good opportunities for people to work with them, since people will be less likely to risk something new (read anything from ruby or python) and will rather patch the old code.

I am just developing application in Django, but after I finish with it I think I'll put some of my time in learning new PHP [1] just in case. [2]

Also like he said this is good time to add to your skills. On my immediate howto is jQuery (and js in general), and finally learn ruby on rails. (If you get to create new project from scratch you are not limited to old languages and tools )

[1]: last time I worked with php it was still at 4.*
[2]: I have never worked with javaEE, only plain java in University and some desktop apps. I don't know if its worth learning it form schrach at this time though.

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