I’m aware that a lot of people, when faced with a period of not working, lose their sense of rhythm, they fall into a downward spiral of unstructured, unproductive life.
I don’t want to do that. So, although I’m taking some ‘planned downtime’, it isn’t going to be a waste of time. There are things I could learn, perhaps things I could actually do, during this time.
For a start, my current skillbase is rather Symbian-oriented. Right now, this isn’t a bad thing since they’re kicking up a bunch of useful work at the moment. But thats not going to go on forever – either it turns commodity, like VB programmers are 2-a-penny, or it dies altogether. Neither of which sound like particularly attractive career choices.
This all leaves me with a question – what /can/ I do?
Someone I worked with observed, some years ago, that software integration will become an important task. I think we’re there now, and probably have been for a while, most of the software you ever wanted has now been written, it just needs to be made to work on your phone/microwave/ICE/whatever.
After my time in Tokyo I’m quite confident about integration of Symbian applications and systems in general, but my knowlege about other systems is somewhat poor. Which suggests an objective: learn to integrate software on other platforms.
What does that mean? Well, I suppose it means to produce software that works on platforms other than the one(s) it was originally written for. But more importantly it means documenting the process for doing that integration, with a view to making it a recipe sheet to follow to make software ‘just work’ on new platforms. If that is possible, and I’m not sure that it is, then it would be conceivable to create an ‘auto-integrator’ of some kind which would follow the recipe sheet. Of course I don’t expect this to make things work out-the-box, but it should at least mean that things get closer quicker.
To some extent I’m not particularly bothered about re-inventing the wheel here, since the purpose of the exercise, for me, is one of education rather than one of actually producing new things.
Observations? Thoughts on things that would be useful to integrate?
I’m going to start with enlightenment on cygwin, after last weeks windowmanager debacle. But first to put together a webserver/journal/wiki thing to record the process for later review.
7 comments