Pat Shuff's Blog : What's the next hot tech?
I get what Pat's saying. There's so many different areas to explore, it's hard to pick just one and try to put all your effort into becoming a focused, specialized guru. At least in my situation the decision is made for me. There are only a few other people in my area and we're a relatively small entity so I'm forced to know a little about everything rather than a lot about something.
The good news is that I've gotten to take a look at and play with a lot of different things. I've gotten to do disaster recovery, OLAP, python coding, web design, and query optimization to name a few. Am I great at any of those things? Definitely not, but I do get the job done with what's made available.
The bad news is that I could be making much better use of each of the tools that's made available to me. If I could focus entirely on database optimization I would get our little database so slicked up I'd never get another call from a user that a query is taking too long. I'd have all the perl scripts I need to automate all my administrative duties if I could ignore everything else and dive right in to just perl.
But, sadly, that's not the way things work. I have to figure out what will get the job done, learn enough to make it work, then code it out and see the results. Sometimes it turns into something I regularly use, like
Ant, and sometimes it's something I use only when necessary, like perl.
I would say, though, that given unlimited resources I would go after java web applications, probably using something like JSF or some other framework with an Oracle back end. That seems to be really exciting stuff and gets more towards my original dream of writing applications with the acquired taste for databases.
