Dan Hartshorn

In 1980 I was nine years old and my dad starting selling these new magical machines called personal computers. He bought an Apple II+ and brought it home and I was completely enthralled. I started programming in BASIC and Logo and have never looked back. I've worked as a professional programmer for 25 years in the semi-conductor industry and have seen many programming trends, stacks and platforms come and go. But since Tim Berners-Lee invented his brilliant markup language HTML in 1993, and the stars aligned behind web browser standards, CSS and JavaScript, these core technologies are thriving and don't seem to be slowing down any time soon. So it's on these "evergreen" languages I'll focus my energy. They have staying power. Add SQL and an object-oriented language like C# (my favorite), C++ or Java to use for heavy lifting in data mining and transformation, we got ourselves a complete toolbox for coding pretty much anything.