New goal, fluency in major open source project languages in 12 months

Saw a completely inspirational and funny movie this weekend, Julie and Julia. It told the parallel story of a blogger, Julie, and Julia Childs (the famous cookbook author). Besides being funny, it showed the power of setting big goals and moving forward.

The blogger, set the goal of cooking every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook in 365 days (over 500), while holding down a regular job. She then used the blog to document the journey. At the end, show transformed her life and began living her dream as a writer.

I began to think about what I could do that would apply this idea to my own life. I am not that interested in cooking, do doing all the recipe's in someone else 's book doesn't appeal to me.

However, I am playing in the technology startup space. I have been noticing that almost all the interesting projects are occurring in one of 10 or so languages. Several of which I currently know or have learned in the past.

My theory is that there is tremendous intellectual capital being created in all the open source projects that are peculating on the Internet. However, it is as if, you were a scientist in the 1700's and the research was being published in French, German, Russian, etc. And not all being translated into all available languages.

So if you don't understand the major research languages, your ability to use the different projects diminishes rapidly.

So my big, hairy goal is to gain fluency in: C, C++, Java, PHP, Python, C#, Perl, Ruby, SQL, and JavaScript and Objective C. I have a head start in that I currently know Ruby, SQL, and JavaScript.

So this weekend I pulled off the shelf the Learn PHP book by O'Reilly and made a set of flashcards. It is very similar to the ASP programming in the 90's before .NET. Took longer to make the study materials than learn them.

The next few days, I have been making Python flashcards from the 650 page book Learning Python. Should have them learned by tomorrow. Very similar to Ruby, seems like they are trying to solve the same problem set. Realized that in order to be productive on the web, I will have to also learn about Django, so I order the book today.

Tomorrow I start on Core Java by Sun, which is one of 2 volumes. I will let you know how this experiment proceeds. I am guessing that in 12 months I will be able to say that I gained very little from the effort or that vast new horizons opened up for me.

Either way I will be able to move on from this idea or get the benefit.