Multilingual

I've been incredibly busy with work since I got back to India. Actually, it's really been like this since the start of this year. I'm working full time for Essential Resources, a New Zealand based company who publish awesome educational resources for teachers, as well as part time for the University, and for an Auckland-based startup. It's quite a blend of technologies and languages. (Sorry, but this post will mostly only make sense to geeks)

With Essential Resources, I'm working in both C# and JavaScript, using ASP.NET MVC with SQL Server and the Entity Framework. Our client-side library is knockout.js, and we use LESS for styling.

For the startup, I'm developing WordPress and WooCommerce plugins, working mostly in PHP, with some JavaScript and CSS thrown in.

For the University, I have free rein to select my technologies, and I've made a few changes. I started with ASP.NET Web API for the backend, and MVC for the website, with CouchDB as the database. I didn't like CouchDB much in .NET so I replaced it with SQL Server. Then I got heartily sick of all the difficulties with Code-First Migrations in EF6, and eventually got stuck in an infinite loop of applying and rolling back a migration and so I gave up. I rewrote the backend in Node.js using Express, and writing in CoffeeScript, and used Mongo as the backend database. The website and mobile apps are all using Angular.js, and I recently converted those from JavaScript to CoffeeScript too, since I love the clarity of the syntax.

So, on a given day, I probably work in at least 4 or 5 different languages, and somehow I mostly manage to keep them straight in my head, although it often takes a few minutes of using one before it feels right again.

If I spent as much time learning Hindi as I do learning programming frameworks, I'd probably have a pretty good grasp of it by now! But it's one of the first things to fall by the wayside when I get busy, so sadly I haven't made much progress on that front. You'd think it would be easy to pick up living here, but I haven't found it so. The majority of the time, I'm with people who speak good English. The rest of the time, they might be speaking Hindi, but they might also be speaking Telugu (the local language) or Tamil or Malayalam (Gopal's family's home languages). So I don't actually get that much exposure. But I do really want to learn it, so I need to spend a little less time playing with new tech stacks and more time learning Hindi.