My favorite tech person and mentor of all times is Mike. And when I’m not having enlightened discussions with him over lunch or in the office, I’m on his blog reading stuff that he somehow manages to churn every day (jealous of his mad writing skillz :)

Today, he writes:

In tech, we’re sort of fucked compared to say a violinist, who can be pretty sure their main tool of the trade isn’t going to change much from the day they pick it up to the day they die, so they can sink all that energy into pure, beautiful mastery. In tech, we don’t even know if our keyboards are going to look the same 5 years from now.

All us, readers of his blog know that his “violin” is a solid combo of Linux/vim/Python/Mercurial – which makes a ton of sense, and if you’re good with that stuff you are golden.

My additional thinking is that javascript, that grew from just something that your browser supports natively into de-facto standard of the coolest new technologies, from advanced client-side frameworks (prototype, jquery, and newer stuff like backbone) to databases (mongo) to server-side (node). So now, the power is in hands of javascript masters: if you know the language, you know how to build up any app, all aspects of it. I definitely has its quirks (callbacks, ubiquituos “this”), but to me they are like delicious puzzles that once solved, promise great rewards. That’s what I’m sticking to for now, and having fun with it.