Has it really been nine months?

Yikes. For me, there's one fundamental problem with keeping a blog: It takes too god-damn long to write an entry. I'm not really a one-paragraph kind of guy. I would guess more than half of my posts have taken over an hour to write. I remember a response to a post I wrote last year that chewed up damn near four hours (and that was right in the middle of my massive crunch to release NE's product, so that time was uber-valuable). Ugh. Anyway, I guess I'll start this up again and see where it goes.

The pressing issue of the day (and actually, of the last half-year or so) is that I'm starting to feel like I'm slipping behind the curve as far as my proficiency with Software Engineering tools goes. Here's what I would feel comfortable listing on my resume at this moment: 3 years programming experience, all with C++, in a Win32/MFC environment. 2 years OpenGL and general 3D graphics experience. That's pretty much it. I could pad the resume a little bit more with 'experience working with XML', 'experience working with multiple threads', etc, but that's about it. So why is this bothering me? Take a look at the current LA software job listings
on Craigslist. There is not a single 'we need a C++ developer' listing there. Everybody wants Java, .Net, web, and database programmers. Damn, whatever happened to C++ client development?

Back in May of 2005, I was asked by my company to become our OpenGL developer and create a graphics engine to display 3D data for our application. I couldn't have been happier with the position. Now... I'm not so sure if I like having OpenGL as a skillset. The grass is always greener, but I can't help thinking that two years of C# and general .NET experience, or JavaScript+PHP+SQL would be more valuable in the coming years.

Of course, that assumes that I'm going to be a programmer in the coming years. This is the real question that I need to answer, and will probably be revisited often in my blog. In my current situation, I can realistically see another two years at my current job. That is basically our window to capitalize on our market opportunity and monetize (we're currently focusing on being acquired). Two years is also (roughly) how much longer I am going to have to wait for my stock options to fully vest. Put those two together and you get early 2009 as the time to move on to something new, regardless of whether my company succeeds or fails. Obviously I will have a bit more freedom if my options make me money, but I'm trying to approach my 2009 road fork without considering my potential stock options. Here's a quick list of potential paths to follow: MBA, risky software startup, risky non-software startup, corporate programmer.

Yeah, that took about an hour to write.