This will come as no surprise to my closest friends, but I am a long time game development admirer. Although I've never done anything professionally I did spend some time in the past studying this amazingly interesting field - it's my dark hobby. As hardware evolves and gamers demand more and more reality from their consoles, the game development industry is one of the few that basically didn't suffer with the latest economic crisis.

Learning new programming languages is fun. And if it's your 2nd, 3rd...Nth programming language you will eventually look for features you already know and love. Coming from Ruby - but after having done my fair amount of Java for many years, among other things - I end up looking for features like blocks, open classes and syntax sugar like automatic generation of attribute accessors. These are hard to let go of.

This is basically a compilation of a few tools/habits that I use to keep focused and at a high level of productivity when working alone. Works great for me and I hope there are useful tips for you as well. Music This is one of my favorites. When working alone I hate having noisy people around, which happens quite often if you work in an open office space like me.

At least, dumb for the companies hiring them. The old dream is still for sale out there: Build a "I do everything framework" and hire a bunch of dumb programmers - monkeys? - and you shall make money easily! Just put some button pressers and a full featured enterprise system will be waiting on the other side of this "machine"! C'mon, I thought this dream was over! We've had enough proofs that this doesn't work!