New Year, New Tech

So, its the last day of 2014 and I’ve been thinking about some of the things I’ve achieved, and gave some thought to what I would like to achieve in 2015. It’s a well known fact that information changes, so to stay current any self respecting IT professional should be constantly aspiring to learn new things, or better understand what they know already.

Here’s my shortlist of subjects I would like to enhance my knowledge of in the new year:

Lets discuss them in turn:

We all know how to test our code with unit, integration and exploratory testing. However, most people rarely pay much attention to the security elements. Ok, so most people can run static analysis with tools such as OWASP, but that still leaves the dynamic elements vulnerable. My aim is to understand some of the common ways of hacking software, and then use that knowledge to better inform some design and implementation patterns in my code.

I can navigate my way through a *nix system fairly easily, but I wouldn’t say im a pro. In fact, if someone took Google away I would be fairly stuck. My goal is to learn 15 of the most common commands and practice using them on a regular basis. This is very much how I learnt to use Git proficiently.

An interesting concept that I’ve hear used a lot, but not ever taken a deep dive into. I’m aware of its benefits in creating DSL’s, so I would like to spend some time working with this cool feature. As I’m still having a lot of fun with Groovy I suspect that will be the language I use to explore Meta Programming.

I’m particularly interesting in the discreet mathematics. As a student I didn’t really enjoy maths, but as ive grown older (and wiser) I’ve gained an appreciation for maths. I guess I’ve come to accept that without maths, we probably wouldn’t have IT as we know it today. Its only fair that I give it the respect it deserves.

So, thats my list of things I will be playing around with in 2015. I will try to blog what I’ve learnt and how I’ve understood the subject, and hopefully share my experience with other like-minded people.