What am I going to be when I grow up Part 2

I ran the technical side of a company for a few years that I co-owned. I created a lot of great courses. I did a lot of consulting and I created two great frameworks. I worked on a lot of great projects with a lot of cool people.  I got paid to do what I love: program.

It was cool perfecting my knowledge of Hibernate, Spring and JSF. It was fun working with JEE. I don't work for that company any more. It is gone. For a lot of reasons, most of which are not technical.

Now what are the next steps. I used to blog a lot about all of the cool stuff I was working with, but lately that had become less and less. Partly, I was not extremely happy with the blog software I was using. I have been going back and forth between blogger and jroller for, well, hmm, the last nine years. Anyway, I have come back to blogger and I plan on blogging more again.

The other reason is I am busy in the evenings. I have a big family and a new fiancee. I have a lot family responsibilities. In the last five years, I have had three children enter in the school system. They need help with their homework and more. I also have a young teenager who needs help and oversight. It is a full time job.

Another reason, is this I have been working with a lot of homegrown frameworks at work. A lot of stuff, I am just not allowed to blog about.

Since the end of ArcMind, I have been working with many different technologies and languages:

• Python
• Stomp
• ActiveMQ
• Django
• Groovy
• Grails
• C
• C TCP/IP programming
• embedded C
• GTK
• Perl
• Roo,
• AspectJ,
• Jackson,
• JSON,
• JavaScript,
• SproutCore,
• and of course Java

One project I worked on required programming in C, Python and Java. Bouncing back and fourth between many modules communicating over ActiveMQ.

I did something I never thought I would, I programmed in JavaScript full time for a while. I actually learned to like JavaScript at some level.

Now I am working on things I can't blog about. I do work with Hibernate, Spring and some outdated frameworks that no one has touched in 10 years, and tons, tons, tons of home grown Java frameworks that are complex and undocumented (not ones I created either).

I want to start blogging again. I want to blog about things I am researching. But what? In the past, work was always an inspiration.

For a while I was researching Objective C / iPhone / Cocoa development. I even wrote an iPhone math game for my son. We all played it. I planned on extending it and posting it on the store. Then life came along. Now, I am not sure. Do I want to continue and learn more about Objective C? Do I want to focus on things I am already good at? There is so much good stuff out there.

I recently did a lot of research (for work) on Java garbage collection and had a lot of success tuning misbehaving GC of some of our services. That would have been a good blog to write up. Also with the tools you have to employ to do proper tuning and debugging.

It seems like every other day SpringSource comes up with something new that could be applicable to work.

I am committed to do some blogging about something. Right now I don't know what.