Midlife technical skills atrophy crisis
Rather like a sad-case-mid-thirties father-of-two-with-an-expanding-girth who still goes to Heavy Metal concerts in order to cling to the last vestiges of his youth by trying to appear hip (as if Heavy Metal was ever hip), I recently decided that I wanted to dust off my technical bones and try to program something again - perhaps some misguided salvation from the Marketing that I have effectively been doing for the last 5 years instead of writing code.
After all, I used to be quite a hardcore techie once, having had several cool C++ and Java gigs* in the past (I was never officially a jobbing .NET developer - just a charlatan cooked up by Marketing/Evangelism group) and the slow decay of my technical abilities has been remarked upon more than once by my smarmy colleagues of late especially those gits with way more time on their hands than me who spend their weekends playing with things like XNA. Still, there's more than a fragment of truth in those snipes and my ability to code up a storm has been receding faster than my Caucasian colleagues' hairlines.
So what did I pick? Microsoft Silverlight 1.1. Why?
- 1.1. isn't out yet and isn't widely understood (bonus - maybe I can get a head start over the other gits).
- It will help me understand a key technology that I'm supposed to know about, albeit at a high level, as part of this new Next Web initiative that I'm supposedly working on.
- The Silverlight site has some very cool tutorial videos that may make my life a whole lot easier.
- It's a hot, cool (sic) property right now and Silverlight in general is on the up when we look at the proverbial Hype Cycle.
So off I go. Expect more inane minutiae documented here as I wrestle with it and try to create something more than just 'Hello World from Silverlight'.
P.S. you can read my sad-case-mid-thirties father-of-two-with-an-expanding-girth review of a recent Heavy Metal concert here.
*I actually wrote this single-handedly. (Oh alright, there were about 6 other programmers too...)
