I was talking with Kathleen Dollard about the response to her op-ed piece (”Save the Hobbyist Programmer”) in a recent issue of Visual Studio Mag. I said, hey, let’s google it to see who else has been commenting on it.

Basically Kathleen’s piece is talking about the difficulty of keeping up with the learning curve and using the effect of this on the occupational/hobbyist programmer as a good warning system.

The article set off a lot of fires, some were in direct response to her point, and others were opinions of the hobbyist programmer. Many of these posts elicited a lot of comments as well. I think Kathleen has started a very important conversation on a number of fronts.

JuJuBlog : “I am not a Script Kiddie but i believe that it is important to give people an accessible path to programming. Kathleen Dollard writes an article which i am sympathetic to…”

Michael Flanakin “OPs [occupational programmers] are trying to develop software and aren’t able to keep up and/or comprehend key topics (i.e. OOP). There are tons of jobs in the IT industry, and OPs have a place, but it’s not in front of a development environment…”

Rory Blyth (Neopopleon) “Before things get too out of hand, I want to be absolutely clear: I am not saying that Microsoft should “ditch” hobbyist coders or anything of the sort. I’m saying that MS should not cater to them at the expense of creating better dev tools for professionals. I am not arguing against hobbyist coders, nor am I saying they should be wiped out of existence.]…“  (lots of discussion on this one – over 100 comments I have heard – did not count them, myself)

Alembic: “Now, it may well be that the imminent demise of the hobbyist programmer is a good thing, now that programming has all grown up, like physics, or chemistry…. Dollard doesn’t see it that way: whither goes the canary to wither, well, that’s where the professional programmer, too, will find herself gasping of air, barely keeping up…”  (This is a very thoughtfully written post. She gets what Kathleen is saying and also brings Shelley Powers into the mix: “There is something in Dollard’s plea for a change of strategy that reminds me of Shelley Powers’ recent posts on the solution f a centralized TypeKey for handling comment management on the up-coming version of Movable Type.” Knowing and admiring both Kathleen and Shelley, it is perfect for the two of them to be compared! I think an introduction is in order.)

Coolbits (Avonelle Lovhaug) : “One of the purported improvements in the next version of ASP.NET is they are trying to decrease the amount of code that must be written in order to perform common functions. If that’s true, perhaps Whidbey will address some of Kathleen’s concerns….”

Mike Schinkel (Xtras.Net) “Microsoft’s responsibility is not only to professional programmers but also to hobbyist programmers, and all programmers in between. Anything less, as a modern publicly-held corporation in a capitalist society, would be a dereliction of their duties to their shareholders to whom they have ultimate fiduciary responsibilty.” (Mike’s essay is long and is more in response to Rory’s post and the resulting discussion)

Jim Fawcette in a comment to the above post: “One reason VB 1,2 3 were so successful was that they enabled people who understood business problems to tackle their solution: It was easier to teach them programming, than to teach C++ programmers business. Microsoft risks losing something if it leaves the majority of its base behind in its pursuit of IBM and the data center”

Paul Vick (VB Team at Microsoft) ”So, in much the same way that small businesses serve a vital function in keeping the economy going so that large corporations can thrive, hobbyists play a vital role in sustaining the ecosystem that supports the professional programmers. Even if the professional programmers don’t always appreciate that…”

There was also some more spin off from Rory’s post:

Joe Bork  “Why Hobbyist Programmers Matter”

Dave Sussman (prolific .net author) Microsoft Tools and Hobbyists

Scott Koon (LazyCoder) Should the Hobbyist Programmer Matter to Microsoft?

My sister was a Sun reseller for many years – a very very good and successful one. But she got burned out and wanted to do something very low-tech after that and started a business where she manufactures dog toys/products. I’ve written about that before – it’s a great success already. www.katiesbumpers.com

It seems, however, that she is not alone!

The other day, Rich and I were in the sales shop at Mad River Glen. I was buying something special for my trip out the Microsoft campus and when I told the sales person, he loved the idea so much, he gave me the item for free. (More on that in another week or so). Then we were joking about doing the same at the Sun campus. There was another couple in the shop and they looked up – “did you say something about Sun? Sun Microsystems?”  “Yup!”. They had both worked for Sun, one in sales the other as a software engineer. They too got burned out and had the same desire as my sister, to do something very far from the high-tech industry. Now they run a golf course!

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/26/seach.microsoft.ap/index.html

The funny thing (to me) about this article, however, is that the headline is “Microsoft exec concedes ‘worst’ goof”. I clicked the link expecting a story on the iLoo. Business 2.0 certainly thinks it was Microsoft’s worst goof.

SecretGeek is at it again – he is too funny!

But also funny is that Christian Nagel wrote a little bit of satire in the same vein and everyone took him seriously. The comments are funnier than even the post!

I was trying to see if it was possible to find someone in NYC to print out a PRN file – from DOS. I thought – might as well check Kinko’s first. The poor girl had no idea what DOS and PRN were. I asked – well, is there someone -ummmm – old there? (Who would understand what DOS and PRN were…) We both finally just gave up.

Two years ago I installed vs.net and the .net framework and needed an experimental problem to solve. ALong came my sister who I had just written a FrontPage website for her brand new business Katie’s Bumpers. She was getting new clients faster than anything! (She is an amazing salesperson) I was being lazy and merely maintaining her list of stores where her products were being sole manually in html. With her quickly growing client list, she was starting to be quite a pest (I’m kidding – we tease her because the real point here is that she has done a phenomenal job in growing this business so quickly) asking me to update update update the website. I knew it was time to give her the reigns of maintaining the store list herself!

So I embarked on my first trials with asp.net –  a web page that access a Jet database where she could keep track of the store names and some sundry info on the stores. Then there is a procedure that creates an xml file from that data and persists that xml file on my asp.net webserver. On her frontpage site, there is a page that goes across domains to grab that xml file and does an xml transform (this is now asp, not anything with .NET) and renders a page with a store list.

Her data entry page is just a regular ol’ data grid with the edit/delete and update buttons. Pain in the butt, I think, but it did the trick.

Cut to two years later. Jill is now closing in on 600 locations around the world that are selling her products. Her data entry page is drudgery and I have promised her for months and months I’ll find some time to work on it.

So today I finally did. The real killer was the viewstate which had been a great utility back when she had 30 stores. So I removed the viewstate on her datagrid, added a form for editing individual records and stuck the datatable for the datagrid in a session object.

It was almost a little embarrassing – but I don’t think I need to be too ashamed that I created these problems in my very first ever experiment with asp.net.

Anyway, that’s really all it took – she is very happy …says the site is “rocket fast” now.

I was thinking this morning that I basically had two options for the day. Go snowshoe up the long trail becasue it’s a nice day and I have been spending way too much time in front of my computer – or figure out how to set up VPC, install the winxp sp2 beta, and figure out how to test all of my apps in that environment. I was cruising the blogs while eating my breakfast and came across this suggestiive post title from Robert Scoble “This weekend, try out XPSP2 and give us feedback”. What an eye opener. Ask my husband who he believes is my favorite charity  — the answer is pretty sad … Molly Stark’s Balcony, here I come…

…and it is BIG and it is IMPRESSIVE and it will impact many people around the world!

here is Sam’s write up on it.

I expect Robert will follow shortly – watch this space!

Thank you Stephen Toub for the best laugh I have had all week!! Maybe we can get it put on the home page of every community site!

Having used CRLF for many many many years, it was fun to read this post and remember where it came from. It’s context had been lost to me over the years.