Crosstraining, Like Back in the 80s

I've been working for a while on one of our stealth projects, a little Rails app that we might be finished, oh, this side of forever. However, it's been a tonne of fun wrapping my head around a new framework and some new ideas, so even if it doesn't come out soon, it's been worth it.

Like really worth it, because for our new client application, we need a persistence layer. In our proposal, we talked about NHibernate, and on the latest sprint, I started creating the data mappings to the SQLite database. Then a little fortuitous Googling led me to the Castle ActiveRecord project.

Bye-bye, crufty XML files. Hello attributes. Hello familiar syntax. Hello saving me literally weeks of work. In the words of one of the "name brand" management consulting types I had the pleasure to work with, we are "leveraging our knowledge capital." By which I mean, "hey, I think I already know this."

So. Crosstrain. Work on your side project. Preferably in a completely different space/framework/language than the one that pays the bills. You never know when that idea or technique or pattern you're using in the dynamic language du jour is going to be implemented (by people way smarter than me) in your blub 4G language.