The enjoyable thing about software is that there is always something out there to play with. Here are a few tools that I want to get more practice with

• DataDog

  I’m working on increasingly complex programs that are deployed over a disparate stack, and monitoring is becoming a bottleneck for continued operation. I will be learning more about adding functionality to the datadog agent so that operations and development teams can debug issues faster and more reliably.

• Golang

  I’ve been writing small programs in Golang for the last year, and I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth into a bigger project with it in the future. I’ve been interested in parallel-processing for many years (see my work on JParallel) and its very nice to work in a programming language that gives me the tools to do this easily.

• PostgreSQL

  I’ve used PostgreSQL exclusively for the past 6 years for a variety of programs that have extended from survey engines to real-estate analysis using PostGIS. My most recent use of PostGIS involved tracking truck routes through Canada.

  I’m now working on a program that compiles reports from multiple tables and have been working on using SQL views so that the data isn’t compiled at the application layer anymore. I intend to learn a lot more about Postgresql functions in the future so that I can move more business logic from the application layer to the database layer since its unchanging and slow.