The Knowledge Portfolio
Posted on January 15, 2008
Filed Under development, mac osx | Leave a Comment
When I started out on my PhD I was given a great piece of advice from a someone who had just completed theirs: whatever you do, whatever you read, document it! Oh, and one more thing Cleve, make sure you read one article, every day, until you have completed your thesis. This was quite a commitment back in the early nineties, when articles were either stored on microfiche and/or you had to send off for hardcopies to research papers that were maintained by other libraries. Believe it or not, not everything was online. There was no Google Scholar! However, I did this and I religiously spent the first 2 hours of every day in the University library reading, researching and reviewing other peoples work. Then, I documented it. At the end of my thesis I had read just under a 1000 research papers in the area of abstract data types, modularity, object-oriented design, software quality and metrics and met some very interesting people.
As soon as I left academia, and went full-time, this all stopped. Boy do I regret this. No, I didn’t stop reading but I did stop taking care of my knowledge portfolio. After reading the Pragmatic Programmer, in which they discuss the need for everyone to maintain their own knowledge portfolio, I feel I need address this. However, you’ve got to understand, within academia I had invested 10 years of my life to C++. When I got my first job, I left both academia and C++ behind (a big relief), and entered the rather simple in comparison world of Java 1.x (and so on), that pretty soon became .NET. Sure, there was other stuff, but those two technologies pretty much had my undivided attention.
That’s all changed now…and over the next couple of months I hope to explain all…
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