I’ve been telling friends and family that we are leaving the east coast in a few months. They typically ask the same questions:

1. Where are you going? Fort Carson in Colorado Springs
2. When are you leaving? We have to be there on May 20th
3. How long are you going to be gone? At least three years
4. Are you coming back? We have no idea
5. What are you gonna do for a job? I have no idea

That last question has been on my mind as of late. I really have no idea what’s going to happen with my job. I’ve got a couple of scenarios in my head, and I’m trying to plan ahead for each of them. Job searches in the Colorado Springs area show that there are plenty of tech jobs out there, but they are all .NET and Java. All of them. Open source jobs are either non-existent or not advertised.

I’ve spent the past few years concentrating on the open source side of web development; specifically PHP. In the past year I spent time dabbling in VBScript with Classic ASP Classic and C# with ASP.NET. I’ve had very little exposure to Java, but the little I have had was enough to know it isn’t for me. I don’t like these languages and technologies. Worse yet, my ability to use them is pretty poor. Now I’m faced with nothing but these as possible future job opportunities, and frankly that scares the hell out of me.

It is probably too early to be concerning myself with this, but I can’t help it. With all the other things involved with this move, adding this to the list will only make it harder. To allay my fears a bit, I will spend time learning C# and perhaps Java (*shudder*). If I feel confident in my ability to pick up those languages and their related technologies, I won’t worry myself sick.

Any advice is appreciated.