
Ask HN: About to take a 6 month sabbatical – what technologies should I learn? - hildebrand
Hey All,<p>To give my background, I been working as a software engineer at one of the &#x27;big 4&#x27; companies for about 2.5 years after graduating college. For the past 6 months, I was reorganized into a position in the company where I&#x27;m doing developer operations (supporting a service) kind of work, rather than straight up software development...and it&#x27;s definitely not what I want to do in the long-term. In general, the technologies I&#x27;ve used at this company are very specific to the company and are not transferrable skills to most current software engineer jobs.<p>I am planning to take 6 months off to focus full-time on learning current &amp; emerging technologies &#x2F; re-learn some fundamentals &#x2F; do some projects (since right now, while I know I can develop well, I don&#x27;t really have any personal projects to demonstrate my development skills).<p>Incidentally, I&#x27;ve also had some major personal life changes lately (both parents passed away recently and I had to take in a younger sibling under legal guardianship), and I need to take time off to also psychologically recover from recent events. Because of my familial responsibilities, I haven&#x27;t had the time outside of work to work on an open source project or teach myself something (and probably won&#x27;t in the near future, if I stay at my job).<p>My questions are the following:<p>- Do you think I should re-consider this plan of taking 6 months off?<p>- Any recommendations on best technologies to focus on mastering? I&#x27;d be focusing on either web dev or mobile dev - probably back-end, but up for any interesting challenge.<p>- Should I focus on making my own projects, or joining an existing open-source one? If existing, any recommendations on where to get started (while GitHub has lots of projects, it seems pretty difficult to get your pull-requests approved for many projects)?<p>Thanks HN!
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angersock
If you can afford it, enjoy the time off. :)

I'd suggest practicing your front-end (vanilla JS and CSS) foo, and maybe some
low-level C hacking, because those are skills that kinda seem to be
languishing in a lot of places. Alternately, go check out some non-mainstream
languages like Prolog, some kind of ML (Haskell or OCaml), or maybe something
really off-the-wall like Smalltalk or Forth.

Do at least some of your own projects, because that gives you a bit more
insight into _why_ certain decisions get made, and gives you a chance to try
and plan for others and see what that mindset is like.

I'm actually taking a sabbatical/funemployment in a couple of weeks, so if you
want somebody to brainstorm/bullshit with, hit me up on email (in my profile).

