And Now For Something Completely Different

It's been a crazy past couple of months. Between all but reaching the point of burning out and having some family things I had to focus on, I was stretched pretty thin and had to make some cuts in my routine. From such, I have some ended up with some interesting observations and frustrations that has me changing my focus for this blog and my own pet project stuff. Some of these changes will lead to a lot of fun projects while others may piss off a few people. Hopefully, these changes will help inspire me to keep working on some new projects and to keep fueling the blog with some new content.

So What's New?

First thing's first...I'm turning into a Mac guy. After over 2 decades of using PCs, I ended up transitioning to a Mac over this past month. I have used Apple IIs and early Macs back in the day but those don't compare to the Macs of today obviously. After using my new MacBook Pro for a while, I may be completely changing everything to use my Mac. This means all of my personal .net development will more than likely be exclusively Mono-based. This leads to some interesting opportunities about not using Visual Studio or even Windows and has been a fairly painless transition thus far.

More things that the Mac opens up is that it provides a great platform for branching out to other platforms; namely Python, Ruby, Java, and mobile development. Yes I could do all of the same development on a Windows box; however, there are some tools and issues I've had in the past. In addition, if I was on a Windows box, I'd be tempted to use IronPython or IronRuby more. I like those languages from the little bit that I've played with them; however, I'm a firm believer that fundamentals are sometimes better than abstractions. So I'm going to be focusing on using the core languages first and then integrate the Iron* languages into my dev work later.

Why New Languages?

I used to be a Java developer years ago. Around the time .Net came out is when I transitioned into the MS world more whole heartedly. I'm working on getting back to my roots while expanding my knowledge into other realms. Over the past handful of years, I've seen the MS-related communities change in a way that, in my opinion, isn't good. A lot of this has been described by other people but from my own personal experience, I feel like the MS-related communities are like the subdued humans in Apple's famous 1984 commercial. It feels like as a community, the status quo has turned into going someplace and being told about a product that was released by MS. I'm guilty of falling into a trap as both a presenter and an observer. I would go to use groups and conferences and sit and listen while someone talked about the latest technology provided by MS. As a presenter, I was the one who put on the dog and pony show for the Managed Extensibility Framework. This blog is a testament to my own hypocrisy.

The issue that I have with this model is that it seems that over the past two years, almost everything has turned into one large non-commissioned marketing machine for the Microsoft way of doing things. I used to be all about Silverlight but now I can't look at it without feeling that it's a web-hosted version of VB6. I would love to say that I was excited to see ASP.Net MVC when it was released; however, around that same time, I was beginning to experiment with Rails and Django. Even to this day, the latest version of ASP.Net MVC doesn't really hold a candle to those frameworks. Yes there are some major differences in the foundations of those platforms; however, even from a feature perspective, the MS stack is lacking. In short, I feel that Rails and Django are significantly better platforms for developing web-based solutions than the MS provided stack.

Admittingly, I haven't looked too far outside of the MS stack myself. I looked at using nDjango and it was a huge change for a common VB or C# dev. I haven't looked at FubuMVC, Spring.Net nor MonoRail so these solutions may fill in the holes during my feature comparison. Even if these other open-source .net frameworks allow for better, faster, cheaper web development; there are still a lot of things that just doesn't exist in the MS space. The largest one being a package management system but it's not the only one.

Solution frameworks "measuring" aside, the community is beginning to concern me more and more every month. The perceptions are skewed. Mine was and to an extent, still is. I used to think that anyone who presents or has a blog is a super star. I have been called such; however, I assure you, I'm not. I started this blog and began to do speaking because I love to talk about technologies but also to provide an outlet to learn better. When I was doing Java development close to a decade ago, the community seemed more about helping each other and swapping war stories on how a developer fixed a given situation. I've never had that feeling at any .net function I've been to outside of an open space slot at a conference and even those are a crap shoot sometimes. The dialog between community members feels very limited. Twitter has been great for bouncing ideas and getting help to questions but applying such to a bunch of developers in a room at a conference seems to be difficult. Participation for such open discussions, round tables, and dojos seems to paralyze people. This is concerning.

So What Am I Going to Do About it?

I was told a long time ago to not bitch about something unless you offer a solution or at least some way to possibly change/improve what you're bitching about. To that end, I'm dramatically reducing my .Net coding outside of my day job. I want to learn more about other communities and languages and techniques. I learned a ton when I was playing around with Rails and Django years ago and, to a more MS extent, Subsonic. I want to continue learning such so that I can help apply those ideas back into my day job, my presentations to user groups and conferences, and of course this blog. If anything, more hybrid projects will come from such. I fully support mixing languages in solutions in order to take advantage of each language's strength. I have started working on a project that is utilizing HTML5, C#, F#, an Object Database, and IronRuby (for testing). This isn't something you'd see in today's .net ecosystem and it's not really advocated much by those who are doing MS's marketing. I'd love to see it in the wild but it's a far stretch for a number of reasons. Regardless, I'm going to be working on seeing about applying different concepts across the languages and see how things go.

So stay tuned. There's a lot of new stuff that's going to be coming down the pipe shortly and it'll truly be fairly random.