“The Geek’s Dilema”

In a recent posting to his weblog, Russell Beattie lists some of the things he'd like to get round to doing, then comments:

Obviously I don't have 1/10th of the bandwidth to get this all done or even started even if I was a much more organized and productive person than I am now. Which leads to the Geek's Dilema: Which technology will be useful later on. Like I've said a zillion times in the past, there's never been a technology that I've played with and learned that at sometime in the future hasn't paid off at work or on a job. So its important that I do play and keep exploring technology and working on pet projects, but there isn't enough time in the day.

I know exactly how this feels. Yesterday I was reading about C# in a computer magazine and it really made me think I should find some time to learn C#. I remember thinking the same thing, way back, when C# was still just a clever name and few people had yet got their hands on it. Until now I've always tried to resist the temptation to dabble. Part of me wants to get into it. Another part says no, you're a technical author with a family, you don't need to know about C#.

I'm prone to being a Jack of all trades, master of none, so I try to limit myself to spending time on authoring stuff, web stuff and Perl – in an attempt to master those. But then Jack whispers in my ear: wouldn't it be great to write little Windows applications – it would be really useful – I could write Windows versions of the Perl programs I use, then people with no knowledge of Perl, and without Perl on their machine, could run them from their own machines, click-only fashion.

Resist! resist!