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I listened to FLOSS Weekly's podcast on nginx today, and it hit a cap on something that I've been considering for a while. Basically, I have worked in a few technology stacks over the years, but if I was to say what I've spent most of my development time with, I'd have to say Linux machines, Apache web servers, MySQL databases and programs written in Perl. 

This is not exclusive: For a while, I did work with Windows on whatever their default server was, doing Active Server Pages with VBScript connecting to an Oracle DB, while being admin for a VMS system. I've written Python, Bash, R and JavaScript. I've tied hashes to Berkeley DB and used flat-file databases before I learned the next steps. Not that I ever got it into production, but I've written Visual Basic for Embedded to build an app on an iPaq in the days before .NET. And I'm sure there's more that I've forgotten. But the things I write for myself tend to be hosted on Linux, distributed over the web, served by Apache, storing to MySQL and generally written in Perl.

We'll call that my comfort zone.

The comfort zone is a good place. You have a job that works in the comfort zone, you know where to start. You likely have a "framework" in place that you can adapt to what the new thing is. The world can turn quite a lot while you sit in your comfort zone.

Aside: I generally don't use frameworks, because I know my comfort zone well enough that I can make separate things fast enough by adapting existing things that I'd rather do that than spend time trying to learn a framework. With Catalyst, I timed out twice before getting to the point I could do something with it. I'm better with Dancer, which is closer to the level of web programming I'm comfortable with, but the individual-pieces-of-CGI I work with doesn't lend itself to the web-applications world. Our lab still does puppies, not cattle. Consider that part of the comfort zone.

The first thing I missed was Python and Django. I was the last remaining Perl guy when most everyone I knew went to Python in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Then there was Ruby and Rails. I could probably get to iterative and recursive Fibonacci on both without looking too much at the documentation, but I've not spent quality time with either. 

There are two problems with staying in a comfort zone. First is, the world goes on, and eventually nobody values your comfort zone. There are still places where they want Perl people, but other languages are higher in the desired skills list. The other is that it's a good way to burn out. Everything looks like X and you get tired of looking at X. 

I think the hot spot for web development, the place I'd be if I was starting out right now, is still Linux, still Web, but nginx, MongoDB and Node.js. I like what I've seen of Redis and have used it in a personal project (and really, I've spent enough time with it to REALLY like MySQL; I still think in tables), but I think that MongoDB maps well with JSON (which works well with Perl hashrefs, which is the source of my love for it all, I won't lie) and is my fave so far of all the NoSQL databases I've played with so far.

So, I'm curious: if you were starting over today, knowing the computing environment and your own preferences, what would you start with? Why? Is this stuff you use right now?