Part of your career's intellectual portfolio should include regular learning. Whether you're in the language of the year (LOTY) or the technology of the year (TOTY) club, it's time to have something in mind for the coming year. Regular deposits in the account of you is the only way to build up a nest egg. Don't let the current crisis at work keep you from starting today. There will always be crisis of the week. Start now or you won't.
Having said that, let me share an announcement with you. A friend of mine, and former co-worker, Kevin Smith has a public Erlang class coming up soon. Erlang is a great candidate for your LOTY because it teaches you a new way to think about programming. And it's ideally suited to take advantage of new technologies like multiple core computers and cloud computing.
Hands-On Erlang
Enjoy!
Every day I keep seeing more and more tidbits in the Erlang area.
A week or two ago a friend of mine released virtuerl, an Erlang wrapper around Amazon's EC2 API (with aspirations to be more of a generic grid wrapper). Also see this post with more information and this one with an install image.
Today I saw this post, Introducing the XMPP application server: The Twitter example. It's a very cool app server for XMPP messaging. It scales across machines when you add hardware. The example app it shows is based on the Twitter model. So if you want to write a scalable social app with Twitter-esque messaging, use the API.
What does this mean? One of Erlang's strongest points is it's ability to scale across CPU cores and machines with a minimum of developer effort. It's beginning to fulfill that promise.
I've got to carve out some time to learn Erlang!
