Considering Re-geekification

Yesterday I met a 16 year old fellow Singapore blogger over Twitter – he’s just completed his O levels and is going to enroll in Temasek Polytechnic for its IT course. Yes… the course I attended 8 years ago.

But this guy is good. He’s published 2 WordPress themes, and his web design skills are awesome.

On the other hand, yesterday I met up with potential client. He was relating some computer issues to me, and I whipped up an Excel file with formulas for him – and it took less than 10 minutes. That 10 mins of work will probably save him 5 mins every time he uses the application… and from the looks of it, it will probably use the application 5 – 6 times a day.

He was very happy, and I was happy too cos I got a free McDonalds dinner.

I feel good when I can use technology to help people… and I kinda miss my geeky days, back before 2002 when I was still poly.

I hate when I see potential functionality in WordPress which could be filled with a plugin, but not knowing how to code the plugin in 2 hours. I hate it when I see beautiful WordPress themes, and knowing that coding that functionality in my own themes will mean sleepless nights for me.

… and yet because of my own IT background, I refuse to outsource. Arrrgh… I really hate being in the “neither here nor there” situation.

I miss the days I signed off my emails with “an(T+Ki+n)”.

So I’m considering self re-geekification in 2009.

There is a lot of catch up to do. Things have changed a lot since the days of VB6, Visual C++ and hacking the Windows Win32 API pointers.

The good thing though, is these higher level languages are much easier to learn and manage. Having a web application using too much memory is sure better than picking handles to memory locations in Windows. It will be profitable too, if I do it well, and make full use of my web marketing knowledge.

So, should I dive into PHP, AJAX, jQuery and VBA for Excel?

Its exciting and it will be a year of sleepless nights, “encapsulating” books of code, “inheriting” knowledge from the code gurus, and “polymorphing” myself into a kian-geek.

(if you don’t understand the above sentence, you are not and have never been half a geek.)

Do you think I should re-geek myself?