Programming

I haven't written meaningful code in 4-5 years, and that was all in Fortran or Perl.  I'd argue that in those days programming was a necessary evil.  Now that I don't need to write code for a living, I am fascinated by it.  Part of the reason is that I have all these ideas and would love to be able to at least try some of them out myself.  The other part is that things seem to have become very interesting, especially with data driven apps and web-scale computing.  In particular, there are a number of things I want to try to do, and hopefully over the next couple of years

• Get more familiar with basic Ajax principles
• Get really good with Ruby
  • Also get competent with Ruby web frameworks (Rails for now) and associated tools
• Get familiar with the Semantic Web stack, especially RDF/SPARQL.  Will probably end up leveraging the Talis platform for this.  Also interested in leveraging Freebase
• Get familiar with distributed data and data processing
• Hadoop, CouchDB, SimpleDB etc

  Also, really need to understand web servers.  The whole Apache, Nginx, Mongrels, HAProxy etc, ecosystem confuses me a bit.  Maybe I just don't quite grok web programming yet.