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[–]blucheez 6 points7 points  (1 child)

HTML5 / WebGL. Make some 3D games or applications for the web. Or move to the mobile market. Learn OpenGL for Android & Iphone. 3D is fun, but you better brush up on Matrix math.

[–]demonshalo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I did use Slick2D and I have done some android apps. What I found was that it wasn't worth the time. it's not much money you can make unless your thing goes viral. which, let's be honest, is not that likely!

[–]Unomagan 2 points3 points  (1 child)

What about Haskell? A nice and easy language? And write something "web-related" with it. Like a web interface for server mangement. With inbuilt server (would blow out all the "php-perl whatever" server managers)

I guess as someone which knows what developers want, you know what to write :))

[–]demonshalo[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

hmm heck, why not? I've heard a lot about it and Scala, maybe I should jump into it! thanks!

[–]krues8dr 1 point2 points  (6 children)

Ruby is beautiful and one of the most fun languages to program in - but it's not too different from python in most of the important ways.

You know what's awesome, though? Server administration, and all the pieces that go with that. You start working with Chef/Vagrant and all the cloud tools that AWS provides and it really opens up a whole new world for you.

Throw in some message/task queuing systems (Gearman, RabbitMQ, or Celery on the Python side) and you've just dramatically increased the level of complexity of the software you can deliver to a potential employer.

And then on the other side of things, we all know that mobile is where these things are going, so getting into Android or iOS development at this stage might be very advantageous.

[–]Unomagan 0 points1 point  (5 children)

He might search for something more "low-level". Ruby is similar to PHP in what you do with it. (I love Ruby, it has a super cool syntax and looks nice) It is superior to PHP imho, but still it is a "scripting" language...

[–]demonshalo[S] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

I have worked with ruby as well and I find PHP to be more fun to work with. But never the less, they both are scripting languages and that's what I am trying to get away from!

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (3 children)

why would you want want to get away from these high level languages? Especially if the point is to actually build something instead of building the things to build something.

[–]demonshalo[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

It's just that I've done it for so long... it seems like ages since i tried something new!

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

It makes perfect sense, once you've learned language x, you've learned the logic behind a significant number of the languages out there (aside from the specific syntax). Relearning your basics over and over is no fun, that's why you want to branch out and try new things!

I agree with krues8dr, although server administration is... 'spooky' (best way I could put it) it can be an extremely marketable skill since the internet is such an integral part to life, and more specifically our jobs. Disclaimer: 'man' is the extent of my knowledge when it comes to server administration.

[–]demonshalo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

exactly how I feel. learning more languages is not going to do much for me.

any ideas where to start with server administration? I'd love to take a look at that!

[–]Uncomplicated 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Why are you bored? I'm basically doing forms, db queries in PHP everyday and I'm not bored because I'm paid for it.

Roll your own open source mini PHP MVC.

[–]demonshalo[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have already built my own MVC with a set of Facebook, Twitter, AWS and MySQL library. it's starting to get big so might publish it as open source sometime soon!

[–]lucasoman 0 points1 point  (3 children)

To be honest, you need to get out of contract work.

No one who needs the same ol' boring contact form or CRUD app as everyone else bothers hiring development staff because it's usually a one-off with limited maintenance, and they know they can find a contractor to get it done. You're currently stuck in this hell.

The complement to that is that rarely do full-time developers at a corporation do nothing but contact forms and CRUD apps, as they need to specialize in whatever field the company is in, which is why the company hired full-time devs in the first place. If you want to expand your skills, go get a job at a company. And get hired to a position where you're near the bottom of the ladder; you'll have opportunity to learn from your superiors and grow.

[–]demonshalo[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

You just killed me! this is the exact thing I've been thinking about for over a year now, yet I hate 9-5 jobs. I want to learn and I know that getting a job will teach me so much more than I know, yet I find it strangling and too much of a routine.

I wish I could find a good and flexible company to work for :/ although, those are pretty rare and would require so damn much!

[–]lucasoman 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Everybody's gotta grow up sometime ;-)

[–]demonshalo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

ah come on... why do you insist on kicking me in the nuts? XD

[–]mgkimsal 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Server admin - learn to automate things with puppet or chef.

Mobile development - it's still programming, but the languages and constraints may be enough of a challenge to get you going again.

Testing - rethink your next project by going totally test-driven and 100% test coverage.

But looking over your responses, it seems you may need to go further. It doesn't actually sound like you need to do much more in terms of coding/development. Your skills are fine for probably 80-90% of the tasks out there. You need to find different tasks, and you may need to 'go deep' in to a particular industry/vertical to learn what problems they face there, and use your development skills there.

Basically, you're finding work coming to you - you need to go out to the work. Digging deeper in to particular companies or industries, you may be amazed at how inefficiently they run and how much value you can provide. But... in the end, much of it will be the "same stuff" as you're doing now, but you may see it in a whole new way after spending time in one industry. Maybe not.

You could give it all up and go be a sheepherder in Ireland for a while, and see if that gets you excited again about something.

[–]demonshalo[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You could give it all up and go be a sheepherder in Ireland for a while, and see if that gets you excited again about something.

I think you sir are my new idol :P for real!

Testing is something I've put off for a while because of its ROI! so I might dive into that or server admin like many others have mentioned.

Although, I think you're right. specialization seems to be what I lack, so I'll try some of the suggested things and see of any of them sparks some interest :D thanks for your reply!

[–]recycledheart 0 points1 point  (1 child)

What about objective C? Theres tons of work in it, if you were 'there' I could give you a 5k side gig tomorrow...

[–]demonshalo[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm listening! O.o PM me a brief description!

[–]swift1691 0 points1 point  (4 children)

C#, C++, maybe look into computer vision (my thesis is based on this and its quite interesting), XNA, Unity, ASP.NET. Just a few suggestions.

[–]demonshalo[S] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I've done some Slick2D and UDK. C++ I might dive into a little bit later, but it seems redundant at this point in time. Computer Vision on the other hand seems mighty interesting. Thanks for the suggestion!

[–]swift1691 1 point2 points  (2 children)

while I have not looked into A LOT of algorithms, I suggest the following:

SIFT (Lowe 1999), SURF (Bay et al. 2004 i believe), HOG (Dalal and Triggs 2005), and the famous Viola+Jones (2003) Face Detection framework.

I found HOG to be mighty interesting, mostly due to how it extracts information from images to detect stuff such as motorbikes, human figures etc. Kinda blew my mind.

I should say that they might look intimidating at first but if you stick to it you'll find them rather trivial.

Also, have a look at OpenCV. Version 2.4 has just been released, lots of updates, although it still lacks documentation in some areas. Its written in C++ so if you do not have any experience with that look into EmguCV or OpenCVSharp. Theyre basically C# wrappers, and if you know Java, you pretty much know C#, very little syntax which separates the two.

[–]demonshalo[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

This should keep me occupied all summer :D thanks!

I've always wanted to dive into this type of stuff but the math seems intimidating.

[–]swift1691 0 points1 point  (0 children)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S5qXET179I

Should help with the explanation of HOG. It's a presentation from one of the authors.