One of the biggest hangups I had when starting to program was deciding what technology to use. At the time I was only writing server side code and was working in shared hosting, so my options were limited to various versions of PHP.

Within the last year I started using cloud hosting and thus gained the ability to configure my servers to use any language I wanted. Shortly after realizing this a small amount of fear came over me. The choice of language wasn’t made for me anymore, I would have to pick from a giant pool of languages. I would also be spending at least three months learning all about this language I picked before I would feel secure in it. After that three months I might not like it and would have wasted three months of my life.

At the time I was doing a lot of freelance and was instructor at a college teaching web development. Because I was teaching I wanted to know the basics of all the languages I could use on the server, just in case my students asked me about them.

I knew the basics of most of these languages but I had never written anything substantial in them. So, over one long weekend I locked myself in a room and started writing hello world, testing frameworks, making CRUD, overall building projects in every language and every framework I could get my hands on.

Four days later here are the four things I learned.

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