So, What's next?

I've found that lately I'm in a bit of a rut. I need to flex my brain a bit and learn something new. I need some pet project that will challenge me. Here's some things I've been thinking about learning or actually doing:

- learn Ruby
- create a new facebook app, just to get reacquainted with the PHP SDK.
- create an Adobe Air app
- Create an Android app
- learn MongoDB
- expand knowledge of HTML5 and CSS3
- Create an opensource javascript project and put it on GitHub

Wow, that's a lot. I'm mulling these all over and I'll be trying to cross some of them off my list in the next 3 months.

Any suggestions? What on this list would you want to tackle?

Projects, code and other things...

I've been learning a lot lately. For the last few months at work I've been on a team working on a new virtual world for kids done entirely with Flex 3. It took some getting used to, but now I'm totally into it. Flex Builder is an excellent IDE for working in Flex. It's built on Eclipse and integrates well with the Flex framework and compiler. Definitely worth the money.

I'm also learning to use jQuery and starting to get the hang of it. I've worked with object-oriented-like javascript before, building the framework myself, and then worked with the prototype framework and scriptaculous. jQuery blows them away with its ease of use and capabilities. It's a very powerful tool.

On another project I had to work on parsing rss feeds from youtube using some custom javascript. It worked out pretty well, got it to parse a user's video feed as well as custom playlists.

I've been working on my own facebook app, but due to sheer laziness, I never actually finished and launched it. I missed the boat on the app craze and it looks like the pool has been diluted. I may still finish it and release it, but I'm not too concerned over it now. If anything, by working on some apps at work and on my own app at home, I've learned a lot about REST and about the facebook platform. Anyone needs a facebook app, just let me know.

I've been doing a lot of reading on PHP 5. I've been away from PHP in my professional life, but have kept up with it on my own. I switched over to PHP 5 a year ago and started writing my own framework with database abstraction layers, classes and subclasses, etc... It's fun stuff.

What's it all mean? I have some personal projects I need to work on over the next 2-3 months and they'll be utilizing these skills. I hope to get at least one done before hockey season starts. Once the puck drops, I spend more time watching reading and posting about hockey than I should be on my projects.