I haven't posted here since November. That certainly doesn't mean that I've been "out of the scene". It's just that my scene has changed, as any of you that subscribe to my del.icio.us feed can attest.
When I first started doing web development in the mid-90's, the name of the game was CGI using Perl. My browser was Lynx, then Mosaic, then Netscape. I still remember the day that I first started playing with Table tags. As much as Tables are no longer de rigeur among the hip folk, they'll always hold a special place in my heart.
As I started to realize the CGI scripts weren't for me, I began to move towards Microsoft. At first, I was building dll's in VB that would get called by my forms. As ASP emerged, I hopped onto that bandwagon and held on tight. Rather than building websites, I was now building web applications.
After doing ASP for 4 or 5 years, ASP.Net came out. I was now a lead developer and had to make the tough decision whether to stick with what I was good at or whether I should move our development team towards ASP.Net. Thinking back, I don't think that I even hesitated in moving us to .Net but now that I reflect on that I wonder why I didn't have more fear in jumping into the unknown.
Fear is definitely what I'm facing now.
I've been leading ASP.Net teams for a few years now (and coding on the side with it as much as I can) but I've been feeling the itch to change. Over the past year, I've started to take steps to introduce that change.
The first step was to adopt the Scrum methodology for all development. It's been a resounding success to the point where I don't think I want to work without support for Agile processes.
The second step was to stop ignoring all of the blog articles on Ruby on Rails. I've taken the time to find out what Rails is all about, I've bought the prerequisite books, I've sat down and coding something that's gotten me beyond scaffolding and I've come out with a decision. I love Rails. It reminds me of my ASP days when I actually coded for joy rather than work. It gives me all of the fun that ASP had but it actually wraps up all of the goodness of OO, Unit Testing, 3-stage deployments, Web Security, and Javascript (AJAX) support. On top of all that, it's Agile as hell.
The final step I took to oblivion was to get myself off the PC kick. I went out and bought a MacBook Pro with all of its Core 2 Duo goodness. This was one of the hardest steps. Since I couldn't right-click and I didn't know any keyboard shortcuts, I couldn't even copy and paste for the first week. But once I got over these initial hurdles I found that I really started to prefer my Mac to any of the PC's that I work on at home or at work. When I finally hit Windows-Q on my PC at work, I knew I was now a Mac guy.
But with all of this change, I'm also facing a lot of fears. Maybe it's because I'm older, but I am finding change a lot more scary now than it used to be. Maybe I have more to lose now'
Whatever the reasons, I've definitely tried to face my fears as directly as I could. And now that I'm starting to come through the other side, I'm actually pretty happy with the changes. Of course, changing project management methodologies, software development platforms and operating systems doesn't qualify as a life-changing event to 99% of the people out there. :)
Anyways, the final move that I've made is to sign up a 2-year deal at Dreamhost for hosting my Rails projects. Expect to see some changes over the next while as I move DNN to Joomla and SubText to Wordpress. Not bad considering it works out to roughly $5.83 USD per month for a ton of space!
If anyone else is interested in joining the bandwagon, let me know!