Focus on One Platform, Contribute to Open Source, and Unit Test

It's easy for a programmer to get excited about the plethora of languages that developers have now to build all sorts of applications, but Andrew Theken says the best advice he can give to most programmers is to focus on one language platform and learn it really well.  Then if you're ready to move on after awhile, you can shift your focus completely to a new platform.  Theken also thinks its important to give back to the open source community.  His most recent OSS project is NoRM, a .NET driver for Mongo DB.

Andrew Theken is a software engineer at NoveList.  NoveList's parent company, EBSCO Publishing, has about 360 research databases.  Theken writes mainly in C# and is responsible for the application that builds several of their databases. Theken has five years of experience using C# to build Geographic Information Systems applications.  He also has prior experience in Java and PHP.