This is my particular case, but I think this thread could be very valuable for a lot of people:

I'm a 42 year old computer engineer, with a lovely family, a nice mortgage, a stable but boring job,...a common guy... but I've been presented a unique opportunity: I could take a paid break for some months, one thousand available hours I've calculated, so I've decided to do something really impactful for my professional career: I'm going to try to learn in deep a valuable technical skill I could use for a further job, as a freelancer or running a new exciting startup.

I'm really fascinated with everything about Internet, the startups world, new technologies and I would like to re-think my professional future. But I feel like the ugliest model in a beauty contest, a computer engineer with +15 years of experience whose career has been gradually and inevitably oriented towards managing and planning competences instead of technical skills. I have some Java, SAP and PHP background, but nothing with an in deep knowledge. I'm fully convinced that the world is for doers!, people able to make things instead of tie wearing planners.

In my spare time I've been doing some experiments, even I have two little websites running: a subscription based form builder and a little social network for creatives, both using LAMP but I don't fancy these technologies, I think there are already a lot of Java / Javascript / PHP / Python ... developers out there! and I think that amaizing new technologies help to build amaizing new things.

In my list there are things like:

- Learn a functional language like Erlang, Haskell, Scala... for the highly-concurrent future world

- Learn a technology stack targeting towards Big Data: Scala+Hadoop i.e.

- Learn Node.js

...

What should you do in my case? Are you in a similar situation?

Thank you in advance to this amazing community.

(Sorry for my English, I am not a native English speaker)

user:	southbaybob
created:	February 8, 2013
karma:	1