Focus or die!

I’ve been doing ABAP for almost 3 years now. Despite the fact that focusing in SAP can yields a promising future in my career, I feel that ABAP alone is not enough to satisfy my daily programming job’s satisfaction. I started to explore PHP around 1 year+ ago, it’s frustrating…yet fun. Learning curve is steep and now I started to get the hang of it.

I am actually more interested in software development or web development, more often I’ve thought of quitting my job as an ABAPer and take up another job that I’m more interested in. Here I am, in a new company in Singapore, which requires me to do ABAP and .NET C#.

I’m quite happy that I can finally venture into web development. I started to read up a lot, following feeds from technical blogs, tech news. I read, read and read. The next thing I know, I am lost in the big pool of choices of programming languages and frameworks. I could not focus on a single programming language. I looked into and toyed with PERL, Phyton, C++, .NET, PHP and ABAP. I was busy reading documentations of frameworks like jQuery, mooTools, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, BluePrint, YUI. I started to demoralize myself, because the more I know, the lesser I understand.

Jack of all trades, master of nothing. I identified where went wrong, I know I should focus now.

For now, I will focus on ABAP ( trying to go the OO approach way[pdf] ) and .NET using C#.
It’s nice that Microsoft decided to ship jQuery in Visual Studio!  Finally…open source library in Microsoft product!

Its the first time MS is shipping an open source component they didn’t write with one of their products. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but its almost nuclear in its implications.

Think about it… They are saying “we support this.” In an OSS product, MS has no control over the code. So, they are putting their livelihood (in some small way) into the hands of people who don’t work for MS.

I think jQuery’s popularity, the fact that it’s not mission critical code, and that the codebase is so small all came together to make for favorable circumstances for MS to dip their toe in the water.
Will @ Stackoverflow.com

P/S: Good read: Teach yourself programming in 10 years