If I were doing AJAX work in ASP.NET, Ajax.NET is the kind of thing I’d want to use.

I was reminiscing today that I’ve been turned away from most decent places in my career:

• I went to a stupid high school that raised my grades a full letter when I moved there from a decent school system, leaving me ill-prepared for college
• I was turned away from MIT, CalTech and Stanford out of high school, settling for the U of MN instead
• I didn’t even qualify for a phone screen from either Apple or Microsoft during or after college
• I flunked most of my on-campus interviews and instead settled for a full-time position at the start-up where I’d worked during college (I was originally been hired there because it was run by alumni of my fraternity and I worked for beer money)

And yet, I got all I could out of every opportunity, performed all of the jobs I did manage to get with gusto, learned as much as possible and moved on to learn new things when it was time. Eventually, I found my “way” and I think I did all right, but only because I didn’t let the door slams stop me. You shouldn’t either.

This is fabulous! Let me give you a taste:

“We use words like L2, swaps, and working set. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.”

A: The reason I gave for wanting to cancel an extra credit card.

I bet they don’t have that reason in their script! : )

“Pete” email me the following questions:

“I’m a senior software developer, age 34, specializing in C# development for Windows Forms / ASP.Net, having come from a VB background. Having had some (if not most) of my enjoyment of development sucked out of me by my current employer, I’m contemplating my next career move.

“Thing is (and it’s not just me, several of my colleagues concur), where do I go from here? What is the career path of a software developer? I.e. junior developer, senior developer, guru, author,…? Is there such a thing as a career path for a developer (or anyone, these days)?

“I surmise that developers such as myself (4th / 5th gen language developers) may actually be the first at the crest of this particular wave - I guess COBOL developers could have migrated into hardware / system maintenance, but what for folks like myself? I can’t see myself being a developer until I retire (31 years later), but I don’t really want to move into management either (perhaps software delivery manager, but not a full-blown person manager).

“Or maybe this is just a mid-life crisis. Maybe those COBOL programmers were thinking the same thing. Maybe you’ve thought the same thing, and said ‘Sod it, I’ll just learn as much as I can and write books.’ Maybe my malaise is indicative of the general malaise within IT at the moment (still suffering from the dot com crash, companies more interested in fixing up their offices than investing in IT, etc), companies not knowing their arse from their elbow when it comes to IT spending, etc.

“We live in a world of ever-increasing technology, yet seem to be doing less development? Obviously there are still very clever people out there writing code for phones, text delivery. HDTV innards, etc., but is software development becoming stagnant? Are we still doing the same things with new tools? Why do we still not have modular development? Why are there many standards for Web Services? Where are the really, really cool applications?”

“Pete,” those are all fine questions. I think there are a ton of interesting things to do for software developers in the world and being a part of a big company development machine is only one of them. I’ve done most of the rest (I consider Microsoft to my last job in this industry), so I can recommend start-ups, speaking, shared/open source development, consulting and writing as all valuable, interesting and fun experiences (although, as you might imagine, each of them has their downsides, too).

Or, even if you wanted to stay as a developer, I can recommend different kinds of software to be refreshing, e.g. I’ve spent a lot of time on code-based developer tools and now have moved to model-based developer tools (that’s not a big shift, mind you, but hey, I’m growing! : ). Maybe you’d like to switch away from front ends to back ends or to databases? Maybe you’d like to switch from imperative to declarative or logic? Maybe you’d like to go all the way on front ends and build games? Or maybe you’d like a platform like a mobile device better? (I personally lust after this one!)

Your malaise-related questions are good ones, too. It seems like you’ve identified a bunch of “problems” in the IT industry. You’ve got two ways to handle this problem: ranting or doing something about it. You’ve done the former. Maybe you’d like to put on your “start-up” goggles where “problem” == “opportunity,” bring some of your friends along and roll up your sleeves? Are you brave enough to risk the kid’s college fund to follow your heart? I’ve done it a coupla times and there’s nothing like it.

I saw code that looked like this today:

class Class1 {
  static void Foo(object @this) {
    Console.WriteLine(@this);
  }

  static void Main(string[] args) {
    Foo(“hi”);
  }
}

It freaked me out, but it’s completely legal and kinda cool…

I was chatting with Mike in Australia today and we pulled up Skype as we usually do, ’cuz it just works, e.g. no connection problems, no echo/feedback problems, etc. However, we couldn’t get video4skype to work, so we tried switching over to MSN Messenger 7. The video worked just fine from MM7, but the audio was terrible, exhibiting volume, echo and feedback problems. So, we used a hybrid, i.e. MM7 for video and Skype for audio, which worked just fine.

This hybrid model is prevalent in my communications recently:

• queued messaging: email for text and files, vmail for nuance
• text chat: MSN Messenger 7 or Communicator, depending on whether the person is an employee or not
• video chat: MM7 or Communicator
• audio chat: phone, Skype, MM7 or Communicator
• person-to-person app sharing: MM7, Communicator
• group app sharing: LiveMeeting

Would it be too much to ask that one app do all of this well? Do I really need 6 different apps?

I was chatting today with a friend that complained that he didn’t get any deep technical knowledge from a conference talk. I said that he had unreasonable expectations; the most he could expect from a good conference was the following:

• Networking opportunities (hard for geeks; often works via friend-of-a-friend in bars and restaurants, but only if you have at least one friend and s/he has at least two)
• “Info triggers,” i.e. if you attend a 90 minute talk on MSMQ and you’re having or are about to have a problem that MSMQ solves well, the talk should a) let you know that MSMQ provides a good solution and b) where to go for more info
• Entertainment (and that’s only the good conferences)

In general, every talk should be structured like so:

• Name the thing
• What’s the thing good for
• A demo of the major use(s) of the thing
• Here’s where to go for more info
• Any questions?
• Please remember to tip your waitress

That’s why I really love the idea of groktalks. If you attend 3 groktalks instead of 1 regular talk, the chances of you finding an info trigger are 3x, while still keeping your networking and entertainment chances even.