The Consequences of Job Hopping

I was pretty comfortable, and definitely not bored in my old job. Had a lot of stuff to do. The trouble though with saying in the same role for a very long time is that it's really hard to find time, reason, or energy to step outside your main job responsibilities a little bit and learn something new. I must have encountered a gazillion technologies and products that I really wanted to get a chance to play with but never did.

I wasn't sure when I quit my job at Oracle that working at Google would be any different necessarily. I felt like I'd probably swap my old batch of responsibilities for a new batch of responsibilities, and it would kind of be similar (but hopefully more fun). One thing I somehow failed to realize was that the really great thing about changing jobs is that it gives you that rare chance to really stretch a bit and learn something new.

So in my three months at Google so far, I've been able to get to know some fun new stuff. And instead of just reading about this stuff, I actually get the chance to play with it all the time. For me, this experience has reignited my passion for learning. I'm hoping that I can keep up the momentum.

Here are a small subset of the things I've learned about and used so far (not necessarily all Google technologies):

GXP is a templating engine that's really useful for putting together dynamic web pages. I never got much of a chance to play with JSP, JavaServer Faces etc. before. I like that GXP is straightforward and easy to use. Haven't built anything spectacularly complex with it yet, but it works fantastically well for simple dynamic web content.
IntelliJ Plugin API. I'm still getting my head around this. It's familiar to me in many respects (there seem to be only so many ways of designing IDE plugin APIs). The API is a tad on the underdocumented side, and there sometimes aren't enough samples. I'm really learning "from the other side" what it's like to have a plugin API without source code. I really wished we'd been able to do better about that at Oracle with JDeveloper, and I hope one day JetBrains might see the light too, and make it easier for its plugin developers by giving them access to source code. But it's still a nice API, and you can get a lot done with it.
SWT. I've been using Swing for 10 years, and somehow got into the "SWT is evil" mentality without really giving it a chance. It's actually a pretty fine API for most UI problems. Slightly depressing to see that layout seems to be an intractable problem that all widget toolkits seem to have trouble making straightforward.
BigTable is cool :)
Google Chart API makes it really easy to draw pretty graphs 'n charts 'n stuff
Debian package management
GNU Fortran don't ask. hehe.

Well... that's not a comprehensive list, but I think I've been able to learn quite a bit more over the last few months than I did over about a year or two. Changing jobs is good for your brain :)

The Consequences of Job Hopping

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