fallenrogue.com

Just because we’re not in NYC or LA or [Insert major city here] doesn’t mean that we’re retarded. I try to attend all of the talks that I can, no matter what the subject (so long as it’s on tech,platform, language, etc) is so that I can better understand the landscape that I’m developing in and stay above the curve with new patterns, practices and technologies. Since, for the last 7 years, I’ve made my living as a Microsoft developer, I continue to evolve my senior level .net tool set by attending events that are free or, at least, very cheap.

Now, this is going to sound petty. This is going to sound uneducated and like I’m being a hater or whatever you kids are calling it these days but it’s time for Microsoft to stop lowering the bar for developers. It’s time to stop going out on the road and saying you’ve got a presentation for software architects and then spend 2 hours describing features to your most expensive technologies. We’re architects. Price of admission should be: not an idiot or not person who doesn’t know what this thing the “internet” is. Look, I’ve had an assload of your f-ing terrible presentations and demos. Show me something, anything at all worth looking at and maybe I’ll be able to not hang my head in shame every time the term Microsoft comes up.

The last arcREADY event that I attended (two days ago.) was about bringing web 2.0 into the enterprise. Audience was suppost to be enterprise level software developers and architects. These people are, by their title, senior to expert level .net developers at their companies. We know what Web 2.0 is. We’re maybe interested in seeing how it’s philosophies are being implemented at other companies. I don’t, for the love of all that is holy, need to know where I can’t download the latest TERRIBLE VERSION OF ASP.NET AJAX!!!!!

Then, while going over nearly 20 minutes they proceeded to mention “Web 2.0 Poster Children” and you’ll never guess who has been a beacon of hope and miracles regarding the web 2.0 movement… yes Microsoft. Innovators in the web 2.0 space. Sure they were last on the list but the message was clear. We were not sharing knowledge or best practices, we were bearing witness to the marketing machine that was going to be sure that every idiot in the room left thinking that you need Microsoft’s wonderful leadership to satisfy your manager’s requests for that “web 2.0 thing”. Because they innovated in the space.

I’m being harsh for the wrong reasons. So, if you tuned out during my rant you can start reading again here. I’m more peeved at the lack of honesty on the presenters part than I am at Microsoft. MS is doing some innovative things in the web space. They are just bringing them to the table in a late fashion and in a very component based way.

There have been others who lamented the fact that MS is pushing their alpha geeks away. I’d agree. So, with that, I present my call to action.

It’s time to send your alpha geeks on the road. That’s right. Take some of the people that are kicking ass and taking names, doing it their own way and give them a 2 month vacation. Send them on the road not to evangelize your platform, but rather to show developers why they shouldn’t be paying attention to your competitors. Send someone from Redmond who has the stones to stand up in front of a room full of experts and say “don’t you dare EVER use the update panel in a production scenario. It’s Leaky abstraction. It’s a terrible anti-pattern that we created to lower the bar for the idiot on your team who used to answer the help desk phone who now thinks he’s a senior .net developer.”

Don’t ever come back into my neighborhood again and tell me that the entire world is in love with WS-* (death-star) and we should be so happy that we’ve got a tool that generates proxies for it. Don’t tell me it’s difficult to impossible to do it in Ruby when I’ve done it a million times before using Soap4r with GREAT success. Don’t then try and SELL me on your new RESTful toolkit after telling me that I shouldn’t be interested in that because the WS-* standard is better in every way. Don’t tell me IronRuby is a Rails port on .net when you know it’s not. Don’t, glibly, say that Rails doesn’t scale and Django is not elegant and php has a difficult learning curve and have no real world argument or facts to back that up. Sure, the boys at Twitter had a time of it at the beginning but they solved their scaling problems with Ruby. They scaled quickly because of the 11,000 requests per second they were serving at the time. I’m sure if I had a simple 2 server deployment (front end and SQL server) of some .NET app that I didn’t painstaking take the time to put as much caching as humanly possible in the beginning and suddenly had 11,000 requests per second my site would be slow too.

Look, do your thing, Microsoft. I think you do some things right and I think you do some things wrong. I’m also not afraid to tell you. but you’ve got to do better by your seniors and experts. And by better, I don’t mean make the f-tards and asshats who blog the same stupid “hints” that you present in your sessions. If you come to town and you ask the experts to come out from behind their monitors to hear what you’ve got to say, then HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY. Don’t just stand up there and condescend your stupid message to me.

Sorry for the rant. I’m just fed up. Took the time to gain expertise on the platform because that’s what people around me wanted. Now, I’m wondering why I’m not just dropping it all, being called a noob all over again and interning for any Ruby shop that will have me. At least I wouldn’t have to defend my choices any longer.

MORE RANT UPDATES

I'm officially done listening to people tell me that ruby doesn't scale. Please enjoy this quote from the Twitter team.

    For us, it’s really about scaling horizontally - to that end, Rails and Ruby 
haven’t been stumbling blocks, compared to any other language or 
framework. The performance boosts associated with a “faster” language 
would give us a 10-20% improvement, but thanks to architectural changes 
that Ruby and Rails happily accommodated, Twitter is 10000% faster than it 
was in January.

Source

At some point 2-5% isn't going to help. It's like having a debate between saving 2-5 cents a year. Call me when it's 2-5 million.