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Comment by awinder | Hacker News Reader

This is the best advice on career management. Being able to break out of being "a php engineer" or "a java engineer" lets you target jobs and companies much more freely and ultimately lets you figure out what interests you as a developer in more real terms (and lets you go after it). It also sets you up to lead efforts on solving problems, rather than defining solutions in a more narrow window

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My experience is the opposite, interestingly. I used to know and use a wide range of languages. Being able to say "6 years of professional Scala" has opened more doors, and focusing on a single language has allowed me to learn techniques and algorithms rather than worry about the differences between languages so much.

A colleague that I really respect told me at my last job that his career was a series of broadening and deepenings. He started with a deep knowledge of Java, but found that success came as he branched out into Python, Ruby, and Scala. At that point, he discovered that developing a focus on distributed computing with Scala was the key to the next level, and so on. I think half the challenge is identifying when its time to do one of those two.

yeah defo, learning my second language was big step in my development

for the last 7 years i've been a php developer and i'm currently in the process of learning my second language, #c. it's good to hear that someone else has been through this process before me and said it was such a big step!

thanks for giving me some more motivation!

I assure you many millions of people have been through this process before you! It gets easier after the second, particularly if you stick with mostly procedural/OO languages. So after C# you'll pick up Java, and maybe Python or Ruby in a heartbeat.

Languages with fundamentally different paradigms will still be a little tricky - Haskell, Scala, Stan, R etc don't bear a lot of resemblance to PHP.

I agree to a point... C# is fairly unlike ruby in its idioms. You will be able to write C# in ruby fairly easily but it's a language that doesn't benefit much from that.

Agree on this, and am at the same stage myself; C# is a huge transition from e.g. Php (or ColdFusion). Can't help but be amazed at the doors it opens up though - Pluralsight is definitely one of your friends here. Jon Skeet's walkthrough of C# 4, SOLID, the courses on DDD etc - so much to learn! :) MS Dev Essentials will give you a 3 month sub for free, if you didn't have that already.

In addition, you get to learn a lot of best practices from the trainers at PluralSight. If there were a similar company in the non Microsoft world with as comprehensive a library and as good a selection of trainers, I would love to know about it.

Also, check out their learning paths for C# - it can be a good option to avoid the overwhelm if you are new to the language.

C# is a really nice language. I'm hoping that the new .NET Core work will expand its reach beyond mainly Windows and get it popular on other platforms. Otherwise my book isn't going to do very well. :)

Book on .net Core on Linux; that's great timing, can't wait for you to share more info.

As someone super rusty on it, I found it remarkably easy to get up and running on the platform.

If they can only finish the tooling so that NCrunch can run properly, life will be a bliss.

The book is already out: https://unop.uk/book

The examples are in .NET Core (the cross-platform parts are more Mac than Linux focussed) but really it's a general guide on how to make web applications perform well.

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