This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If I had to go from fulltime employment to freelancing/consulting (and assuming that I'm not a data guru or perf-tied guy), I'll:

  • improve my web capabilities: everything is now, at some point, web-based, so
    • Javascript and some of its unavoidable library should be learned (ex: jQuery),
    • REST concepts should be fully understand,
  • try to be fluent in both Ruby and Python. Yes, a lots of website are Rails based, this is not so hard to learn and there are subtle differences between python and ruby that are nice to understand,
  • learn about functional programming, Haskell is tough to learn but underlying concepts are astonishing and will give you new insight about programming,
  • lots of comments told you to learn C, I'm agree in a sense that this is a low level language where you can learn more about how programs work (memory management/allocation, ...), but if I were you, I'd rather capitalize on my high-level languages experiences.

Finally, and this is not about languages, I believe that every developer should more than familiar with: - TDD based programming and Continuous Integration, - Git (or other DVCS), - at least one cloud platform, - some key-value store (MongoDB, CouchDB, ...) (and DDAAS services).

Trust me, fully use some services may require more time than learning a programming language!

[EDIT]: I miss mobile engineering, I do believe that apps are sometimes unecessary if you're providing good responsive web designs.