I started my career as a C# & ASP.NET developer. I was quite happy with what I can achieve till the moment I got hit in the head. During that time I was assigned to a Dutch company ( Novulo ) to do some PHP development. At the first, I was pretty much reluctant to change the language, but I did not have that much a chance to switch and I knew the company was going to migrate their framework and tools into .NET.

One day, I was writing some code for a company and I needed to do some basic front end code to post some data to the server. I put my form and input elements in place and write the code in server side, everything was in place and boom it did not work. I double check everything, form, input elements names was matching in the server side, and the damn thing was not working. After lots of frustration and spending around 2 hours of back and forth, I started googling to find out the problem. 

It turns out that I needed to put ID and Name attributes in place to post it back to the server. I was cursing php really hard why the heck I needed that. Well, you can be laughing my ignorance, but that was me staring at the computer screen blankly. How stupid could I be that I did not know that. After some time, I remember the situation and realized one thing. ASP.NET did that to me. I have never really really needed to use the basic principles of HTTP Form posting mechanism. Thanks, ASP.NET , you really saved a lot of time by letting me not to acquire those basic skills that is necessary to get the job done.

Of course this is not the ASP.NET's problem at all. The root cause of the problem was my attitude against the technology and the platform. I was single minded single threaded, to do some work. Work that requires lots of extra miles to learn stuff every day.

During that time as well, my javascript was not sharp enough, and the job at that time was requiring some client side code, which I really enjoyed it, and let me extend my skills, and you know what, the more I write, the more I enjoyed it. It is simple, there was no editor, just plain old Notepad++ to write the code. Learning javascript made me understand more new C# basic functional programming stuff, delegates, anonymous functions, lambda expressions etc.. 

Writing PHP felt like, building an apartment with bare hands, but it also made me realize how fragile the code was because there was no compiler, plus if you keep on making mistakes, it will cost more time to realize because of the testing cycle. Thus, READ the code was the most important thing! Lessons learnt!

As of today, I am trying to broaden my knowledge through different platform and technologies. Right now, Android and Ruby on Rails are on my plate. I have been writing some small Java code as well which force me to learn Eclipse IDE. 

The more I explore, the more I feel good, and learning new stuff is always fun ( or it is always fun because you think it is ) 

I don't have desire to be an expert on any topic at all, but sailing on the different oceans let you realize more technologies, and you can better see the bigger picture and that is a very big advantage in today's technology's pace.

Open up your mind and vision, it will pay you back nicely.