Are developers fashionable when it comes to technology? You don’t have to look very far to see that the IT world is far more fashionable that you might have thought. The sheer amount of new technologies that appear on the scene every year attest to it - nodejs, coffeescript, angularjs to name but a few, and they are damn good tech… but do they get traction? The answer is Yes, but not everywhere.
###So what's the issue?
Many software houses tie themselves into a technology stack and tend not to waver from it, whether due to a lack of in-house skills or just to lack of interest. However, it strikes me that all the top coders and engineers I've met over the years have been inherent hackers and love to tinker with what's new (and old, i love playing around with the linux kernel and shell) - so limiting them in the workplace seems counter intuitive. These **poly-programmers** get enjoyment out of the experience of learning new things and applying them.
I myself, like many other coders in the industry in Ireland are primarily in the **.Net** stack - myself for 12 years and got into the rut of hiring only .Net developers. We never had any new knowledge come into the company. Then a few years ago we got a taste of the Silicone Valley attitude with a CTO who took a very can-do approach.
###A possible solution
Encourage your teams to play with technology. Have a day a month where deadlines are frozen and everybody takes a **play day**. The output being an email to the technology team about what they did and learned. Extra points if it solves a problem in work!!!
This way the strong developers will rise to the top very quickly and you're encouraging a Best-in-Class attitude in your teams.
Here are a few to get you started:
- Rails
- Rake
- Ruby
- Ubuntu
- Clojure
- Knockout.js
- CoffeeScript
- node.js
- ESB
- Neuron ESB
- RabbitMQ
- NoSQL Databases
- MongoDb
- CouchDB
- Docker
- LXC
- Vagrant
- TrueCrypt
- Dynamic Programming
- Cryptography (e.g. use of Crypto++ libraries)
- websockets
- Machine Learning with LibLinear
- Scripting Languages
- Python
- Perl
- R
- Bash
- heroku
- map-reduce algorithm
- ssh
- winscp
- sinatra
- tornado
- flask
- xsockets
- ZeroMq
- Git
- MemCache
- Nginx
- jQuery
- Cloud - Amazon EC2
- IaaS
- PaaS
