Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

Most developers spend a lot of time learning. Who can claim an entire lifetime career invested in a single language, or platform?…VB6 to C# to TSQL to JavaScript to Ruby and so on. Sure there are plenty of professions that don’t necessitate quite the same level of time investment in learning the tools of a ‘craft’, but if you stand still you should expect to go nowhere.

I have worked with lots of different types over the years and developers are no different to most, there will always be people at work who think they are simply ‘entitled’, owed a sweet ride; some think their employers owe it to them, others think their colleagues do and in society some think their government does. Lately with the whole Windows 8, Silverlight / WPF ‘will they’, ‘wont they’ deliberations in the developer community, there has been some resentful noises emanating from developers who feel left behind by Microsoft who have gone as far to express fear for their careers and encouraged others to follow suit. I find this staggering, lacking self belief, lazy and in some cases cynical attention seeking rabble rousing.

I have invested plenty in WPF but when it comes down to it, if I have to learn something new because there is simply something better?…then I welcome the education. Perhaps had I been ahead of my time I might have incited a riot when VB6 was outmoded by .NET 1.0, instead I chose to see it as an opportunity, at the time I was faced with either moving on to Java, Swing AWT , JSP and J2EE or to .NET, WinForms, ASP.Net and all the wonderment of web services and remoting (tongue firmly plated in cheek).

Personally I don’t believe Microsoft is about to abandon XAML but if they do then I will treat it as an opportunity and expect that history will show me not to be alone.

I recall some time ago I heard Scott Hanselman suggest that “strong opinions loosely held” were of little interest or consequence to him…at least that’s the sentiment I remember being expressed. That thought resonated strongly with me at the time and just today it occurred to me that the inverse of the sentiment might also be true : “weak opinions firmly held”!

I am attracted naturally to people with strong opinions but the ones I admire the most are those who have “the tendency to doubt and the capacity to believe in equal measure”¹, particularly when it comes to their own beliefs. In my previous career as a studio recording engineer I was (and remain) a follower and admirer of the works of Brian Eno who considered one of his talents to be the ability to liberally contradict himself, which has some foundation in artistic license, an ability to turn on a small piece of mental real estate…agility!

Silos House Dangerous Materials

The one thing that really sticks in my craw though is silo style thinking, blinkered intellectualisation, emotional investment in ones opinions where they themselves are short of any depth of investigation, whether that enquiry is introspective, empirical or studied.

¹ From the West Wing Episode Constituency of One.