Once upon a time I thought I was a pretty hot developer and a bit of a software architect. Then the credit crunch and recession hit leaving me on the job market. A quick glance around the job boards quickly showed me that I had fallen into a rut, comfy with the skills and technologies that I knew, and that I had been stagnating. I had been using .Net 3.5 for nearly a year and had not heard of WCF, WPF, WF and that other card thingy wotsit one. Or even generics for that matter (which, for the record, are now my favourite thing in .Net). I'm a pretty smart guy, I pride myself on being able to learn new technologies quickly and easily but I had been taken by complacency and failed to keep up with the world around me, which can be easy to do in a company that isn't very forward looking.
I decided that I need to work on my skills to get myself back to the level that I once thought I was. To that end I started listening to .Net focused podcasts such as DotNetRocks, and researching the new features that I had been missing out on. Exposing myself to all of this also opened me up to the open source community and some of the great tools that are out there like NHibernate, NUnit, and various other things beginning with N. I downloaded the ASP.Net MVC framework, signed up for the Windows 7 beta and decided to kick off a little project of my own from home.
Fortunately I was not out of work for too long, and I feel that some of the knowledge that I had picked up from my newly sparked interest played a key role in me landing my job. Obviously I am keen not to fall back into that same trap and so I am continuing to try and keep learning and improving my skills, both to excel at my current job and to improve my prospects for finding my next job when the time comes. This blog is one way that I am trying to keep my momentum going. I'm not expecting to build an army of loyal fans, but rather I am using it to try and document my progress and if anyone ever reads it, that'll be a bonus. As I am going to be doing this in my own time* I may be slow to make progress as I need to fit it in around my life as a family man, but I shall be happy if I can see slow but steady progress.
*Obviously I'd like to be applying these things at work too, but when there are real-world pressures to get work done in a timely fashion and no buy-in to implementing these sort of best practices from management I can't afford a learning curve.
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