APIs to Learn

JMS

ASP.NET Web API 

Technologies to learn

Apache Kafka

http://www.autohotkey.com/

OData

Moose 

implementations for JPA are: • Hibernate • OpenJPA • Toplink Essentials • ObjectDB

JMX mbeans to do hardware device control

MSMQ & JMS

Maven

Apache Camel

BPMN (standard based) - Drools, Activiti, JBPM, Bonita

JPA 

Coherence (distributed caching)

JCache 

 Java Expert System Shell (JESS)

EhCache (distributed memory cache)

XAML-related CLR attributes

such as ContentPropertyAttribute or TypeConverterAttribute
ref: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc903933(v=vs.95).aspx

C++ Topics

C++ Templates, dynamic_cast,

Projects to Join

http://www.codeplex.com/site/search?ProjectSearchText=sharepoint

Links to Tutorials

http://www.switchonthecode.com/tutorials

Misc To Learn

http://hivemind.apache.org/

Prism

XPConnect, XPCOM