Cannonball into the deep end

In 5 days, I start a new chapter of my career.  I don't simply start for a new employer on Monday, I'm making a complete 180° as far as the technology is concerned.  I've been in the Microsoft stack for 7 years now and have loved all of the things that C# and a compiler can offer.  I've enjoy using all of my ReSharper live templates to TDD out high quality code with minimal keystrokes.

But come Monday... I'll be entering the wild and wonderful world of using technologies like Ruby/Rails, the Go programming language, Vim, tmux, unix commands, and many more exciting technologies.  It is both exciting and terrifying to undertake a paradigm shift this drastic.  All of the keyboard shortcuts, tricks, and known gotchas will go the way of the Dinosaurs.  This is a going to be a whole new world for me.

I plan on blogging my way through this experience.  As the title of this blog implies, I don't claim to actually know my way around this technology stack... yet.  I'll probably be posting things that are flat out wrong or some practices that aren't the most ideal.  Odds are I'll probably be doing a lot of struggling to get to the point of competency.  This is going to be a fun adventure.  It's my belief that great developer needs to have depth and breadth.  Now that I have a lot of depth in the .NET world it's time to gain some breadth.  

I find it relieving that I'll be working in an environment where others have been through similar technology shifts.  Most of the development is done via paired programming and the environment seems extremely supportive of learning and growing.  The people seem very talented, and I know I have loads of learn from them.  

Well.. here we go.  It's time to do a cannonball into the deep end.  Wish me luck.