As I look back into my life as an IT professional and reminisce, it has been one long and arduous journey, and I guess it will continue to be so, but it has also been every 'bit' exciting, challenging and rewarding!
One thing that I wish I could change though, was the 'unlearning' bit. But then again, if you don't know about the dark side, how would you appreciate the bright side? To know about the good, you need to learn about the bad too! But, sometimes the dark side is so 'consuming', it is difficult to shake it and you become, sort of, 'Darth Vader' in your own right!
New kids on the block don't have to unlearn a lot though (clean slate?!), and do find it easy to absorb the 'right' thing and ridicule the legacy stuff, I did that too when I started, especially with Modular Programming versus Object Oriented Programming, I used to ridicule languages that weren't OOP, now the thing has come full-circle in many other parts of the Information Technology stack (Say, for example: ASP -> ASP.Net [Webforms] -> ASP.Net [MVC3])!
Well, in this instance, I guess I just need to shrug my shoulders and go back to basics and start over again with MVC3! Phew! not so difficult in this case :)
But it IS the case with many other parts of the information technology highway, and I see this phenomena as 'Sky Roads'! Take any technology, and consider it as a 'road' that your space ship is on, the technology is current and lasts for only so long as the road runs, till it is replaced by a new track, and then you have to jump your ship to a new technology (or an updated one)! Now, the catch is, if you don't jump correctly from the road (unlearn) and stabilise properly on the new road (learn the new stuff), you ship will go into the abyss of space!
Get the gist?! Cool, I should go now and unlearn 'bad' stuff about 'Webforms' and learn 'good' things about MVC3! :)
Thanks for reading!