Having sat down earlier tonight with the express intention of further developing my new drupal based website, I've once again made the classic mistake of first checking out my mail. Needless to say, a couple of hours later, I'm still checking out blog entries on Steve Yegge's site at http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/blog-rants. Not that it's been a waste of time mind you - I've thoroughly enjoyed what I've read so far and I recommend that anyone with an interest in programming check out his site. I ended up on Steve's site by following a link from the clug.org mailing list, which is another group of really knowledgeable people who maintain a well disciplined mailing list and have imparted a wealth of absolute gems in terms of Linux knowledge. The relevance of all this is that something that I read this evening made me decide that I should perhaps consider changing the way that I utilize skills that I've gained or tools that I've mastered. Generally once I'm au fait with a new tool, I tend to stick with it as there's a lot of comfort in the familiar. Going forward, I'm thinking that once I've mastered a new skill in the future, I should immediately put it aside and start using a different tool for the same job. As an example, I've recently had to learn vi in order to edit files on my new server, which doesn't have X installed. Having become quite comfortable with vi (albeit reluctantly at first) I had decided that from now on I'd use vi exclusively as my text editor of choice. However, if I were to apply my latest train of thought, now that I'm comfortable with vi, I should immediately stop using it and instead start using something new (to me anyway) like emacs instead. This way I get experience with a wider toolset and I'm in a better position to judge which tools are best for a particular situation.
Not exactly an earth shattering idea but I'll give it a bash anyway .
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