Posted by Matt on Jan 02, 2010
Happy New Year!
First off, happy new year to everyone! I’m hoping that 2010 is better than 2009 for everybody.
2009 was a rough year for me personally and professionally. However, it ended on a high note with a new job and new challenges.
In the waining days of 2009, I began my first iPhone application. I’m still very new to Cocoa and Objective-C but I’m enjoying the parts of the language and framework I’ve come across. I’m getting readjusted to the manually memory management. I’ve been spoiled by dynamic languages and automatic garbage collection.
I really want to expand the languages I work with his year. Mind you, I’m definitely staying in the Rails ecosystem, it’s a fantastic framework. However there are some technologies on my radar that I want/will need to work with.
Cocoa
I want to keep developing in Cocoa. I’m quite impressed with the Objective-C language, the Cocoa framework, and the XCode IDE. So far I’ve stuck to the basic classes. I’m hoping to expand into Core Data and eventually Core Animation to build some nice iPhone (and maybe desktop) apps.
Scala
I figure that I should get some experience with a language for building concurrent software. I was looking at Erlang last year and decided it wasn’t for me. I’m not a fan of LISP like languages. That’s not a knock against the language, it’s just my personal preference. What excites me about Scala is that it supports Object Orientation Programming, can use existing Java classes, and runs on the JVM.
Adobe Flex
Not much to say except that Flash is a widely used platform. I’ve had to integrate with it a little bit now and I assume I’ll need to write some code in it this year.
That’s my list so far. What’s yours?