While browsing the classifieds, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve got to refresh the skill set a little and brush up on some things I haven’t dealt with in a long time.
I’m primarily a Java and PHP developer, and 7 solid years of commercial & enterprise development experience is enough to get my foot in a lot of doors. While my particular expertise is in fair demand, there are a few other areas that seem to be a bit more sought after right now:
.NET Framework
You cannot throw a rock at job listings without hitting an ad for a C# developer. I’ve done a bit of .NET development in the past, but it’s been a few years; there are also some areas of the .NET framework that I’ve never played with. The Kinect SDK is also looking pretty tempting on a lot of fronts. So, I guess I’m going to spending some time in Visual Studio in the near future.
C/C++
Really good C programmers are getting harder and harder to find, but the demand isn’t going away. I wish I could say that I’m one of the really good ones, but unfortunately I’m not there (yet). My first meaningful attempts at software development were all C and C++, but I haven’t been tasked with it too much on a professional level. However, I’ve recently been diving back into some crypto stuff I did for OS X a little while ago in C++. So maybe I can get back into the swing of things a bit more.
Mobile Development (Java/Android and Objective-C/iOS)
There’s not as big of a demand for mobile developers as you’d guess, but theres still a good number of opportunities out there. I’ve spent a lot of time in Blackberry simulators/debuggers, but that experience has proved to be almost useless. I’ve got several personal projects going right now for android; hopefully I’ll be hitting the market with some encryption stuff in the coming months. I’m technically and officially a registered iOS developer, but I don’t own an iOS device … guess I’d better get one at some point (the simulator is getting old).
Advanced SQL
There are TONS of database opportunities out there, and I work with databases A LOT. In the last year, there’s not a major RDBMS package out there that I haven’t worked on in some way or another. I’d say I’m reasonably proficient, but because I have to deal with a lot of different databases, my experience is a bit more generic than I’d like. In particular, I need to brush up on some specific Oracle and MS SQL topics.
I really do enjoy learning new things (and re-learning old things), so I think I’ve got an interesting few months ahead of me…