One of the biggest ideas I got out of the Pragmatic Programmer book is the need to invest in one’s knowledge portfolio.
I was fascinated by this idea, given that I had managed my own personal financial portfolio during college1, and enjoyed the thought process that went behind choosing which companies to watch and when was the correct time to buy.
So upon finishing that section of the book, I immediately set out to do a quick short-term portfolio. There has to be a reasonably short-term bias when you’re talking about programming—a technology that is de rigeur 5 years from now may not even exist today, so how can you plan to go about learning it?
Fans of LTBH need not worry though. There are long-term investments that can be made in a knowledge portfolio. But these are investments in concepts rather than technologies. For example, knowing about regular expressions, the inner workings of compilers, etc. This is knowledge that will not erode with time.
I have put up a Knowledge Portfolio page on this blog (also available in static link on the sidebar). It marks what skills I currently have and what I plan to learn next. Subsequently I will be adding a book backlog as well
You will note that this is a rather sparse portfolio. This is because I haven’t invested much capital (time) into it—I am still in the first year of software developer career. Two years of compulsory military service and two years of project management mean that I’m very late on the scene. So I will have to make up for lost time. Fortunately, the concepts learned doing computer science at my alma mater have helped me get up to speed.
I have not mentioned the main focus of this blog so far. Essentially, it is a chronicle of my journey as I learn my chosen craft of software development. It is a voyage of at least ten years according to Peter Norvig.
Hope you enjoy reading about my journey as much as I enjoy experiencing it.
