So it feels like it’s been an eternity since I was fortunate enough to recieve a greencard in the Greencard lottery, and the following actions occured after which; I quit my well paying job at Internet Software provider Channel Advisor and set out to discover the rest of the world.

After a short stint/holiday in europe I finally arrived in Los Angeles to start looking for a job. It took me two weeks, but somehow I had miraculously found myself in a situation where I had a car, an apartment and a few job offers, finally settling for my somewhat Dream Job at Doctors on Demand an Incubator company located in Beverly Hills, California.

So it’s been 6 months since i’ve become adapted to the new and challenging working environment that is the USA Software Development Lifecycle (USDLC). And i’m at a point where I can actually say I love what I do. I’ve worked on various projects from working in Ruby on Rails, PHP (including various frameworks, cakePHP and whatnot) and now i’m on a fantastic project that involves ASP.NET MVC. I must admit that before coming here I was not at all fond of working in any kind of .NET / Visual Studio environment.

While i’m getting pushed to learn new things, especially in this new and evolving world that is MVC (which seems like an atempt for microsoft to finally embrace the advances in web technologies in the last few years, ala Ruby on Rails, jQuery, etc)

Before going too far off point here – let’s get back to the Title – Self Learning, what is it – why do it?

In the past few weeks i’ve been on a bit of a self learning drive – Starting to learn the Guitar is a hobby I have put off for a long time, but I can say now I have a guitar and have started the process. The other thing that I had on my list for a long time was Surfing. I managed to go out one day, get a lesson and I now have 2 surfborads (a 6’6Fish and an 8ft foamie) sitting near my door, and i quite frequently get a surf in before work in the morning!

So now after my two successful attempts for self learning in my ’3rd place’. I want to apply the self-learning process to my pride, my career. I asked two of my co-workers who I consider to be very skilled programmers what they thought I would best need improving on – and I also kinda hinted some things that I needed to improve on myself (I’m a little rusty at my software patterns).

So it has started, I’ve ordered a book from Amazon.com on software patterns to read at the beach while working on my Tan, and to sit beside me at work whenever I run into trouble with them, ala the days before google could solve the worlds problems in one search.

So I guess the next thing i’m going to be learning here along with revisiting software patterns, is DDD. This topic seems to come up quite a bit with the blogs I read about ASP.NET MVC and one of my co-workers has strongly suggested me to learn it! I’m going to be posting my findings on domain driven design and how I can implement it into my Ruby, .NET and PHP projects along the way.

Ok so I got a ltitle sick of the BlogSVC.NET Application and found it a little limiting, after reviewing most of the blogs i’ve decided to try out wordpress.

After a little bit of work I got a nice little design going here – and I plan on getting some nifty articles on .NET MVC, Ruby, PHP and generally my programming life onto here. I’m also going to get a work page active so you can see some of the stuff i’m working on daily – and I might even make it look pretty too – we’ll see

By the way the photo in the background is actually Santa Monica Pier – which is right near where i live! Yay!

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