See spot code

As an intern at a large international corporation which delivers its innovative technology and technical services solutions to federal government customers, I've had some opportunity to increase my exposure to coding over the past year or so. In fact, some days, I come home from coding (and writing and reviewing documentation, and all that other important stuff) just to want to code more. I know, right?

It all started last summer when I applied for a data analysis intern position. Turns out it was a C#/.NET Developer internship, after all. Well, I had experience in C,C++,and Java, and apparently could code. I got up to speed on C# pretty quickly, and found myself in the middle of a team of developers. This was unlike anything I'd done at home.

I run a Web server, dallying here and there. I use Linux. I run make. I hack existing source. I try examples. I make small applications. But here I was on a multi-year, multi-phase project, incorporating management, testers, developers, and database folks.

But now I want to know more. More specifically:

• I am very comfortable with C# 2, .NET Framework 2.0 now. I want to learn and use the new features of C# 3.0, .NET Framework 3.5, and the upcoming Framework/C# 4.0
• I want to relearn a lot of C++ and Java. I think I'm better at C than I am at C++.
• Perl. 'Nuf said.
• Python. Ditto.
• Databases. Here we go. We write for an Oracle database on the project at work currently, but I want to approach more-than-writing-custom-embedded-sql to less-than-a-dba levels of knowledge. I want to try implementing solutions to a problem in (MS) SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and others (Firebird, umm... there are a few more, but I think after that I just need SQL compliance)
• Web applications. I've written some SOAP Web services in .NET by now, and they seem ok. But my exposure to full on stateful Web applications is quite limited. And I want to learn it without using PHP. PHP would be good to know, but I just don't think it's a great language. Just because PHP and MySQL are ubiquitous, does not mean that I need to use them. I want to learn memcached, and FastCGI, on Apache httpd and MS IIS.