I was having a brainstorming session the other day with a member of my staff and the following question came up “How does one define a ‘Quality .NET Developer‘?” After discussion we realized it was a lot like one of the US Supreme Court Justice’s definition of pornography; when asked he stammered and said “Well, I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it!”
I’d like to put it out there for you to answer: How do you define a ‘Quality .NET Developer’? I’d give you what we came up with but that might be too leading, though I will give you some hints.
Assuming you needed one of the following:
- A developer for a .NET project
- A consultant to develop a .NET application
- A software architect to design an architecture for a .NET project
- A trainer to deliver a training course about .NET
- An author to write a book about .NET
- A blogger to pontificate about .NET
- A mentor to teach you about .NET
- A newgroup or forum participant to help others .NET developers
- A technology evangelist to promote a tool for .NET developers
- A standards committee member for selecting tools for developing in .NET
- A user group leader to manage a .NET user group
- The leading person in your own personal network of .NET developers
What traits would you most want in such a person?
Though my blog has been quiet for several days, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on online projects. Since I launched it over a week ago, http://www.dotnetinfluencers.org/ has taken a lot of my time, but it is coming along better than I had hoped for! If you not familiar with what I’m doing over at dotnetinfluencers.org, basically it is a Wiki, but with a twist. Instead of a normal wiki where everyone is encouraged just to write stuff, I’m encouraging people to help me define an XML schema about people, activities, events, and so forth related to .NET programming.
The idea is instead of a lot of writing define a list of properties for each item and then programatically we can generate lists based on those properties. I’m using FlexWiki and it has a language called WikiTalk which we’ll use to process the properties and provide the lists. Just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here is most of the actual text at this moment for a Wiki page about MSDN Magazine (the properties are the list of the colons, the values on the right; to understand the rest you’ll need to learn about WikiFormatting):
:Summary: About MSDN Magazine
TopicType: DotNetPeriodical
PeriodicalPublisher: [CMP]
PeriodicalName: MSDN Magazine
PeriodicalShortName: [MSDN]
PeriodicalEditor: ???
PeriodicalFormerEditors: JoshuaTrupin
PeriodicalLanguage: [English]
PeriodicalFirstPublished: 2000Mar
PeriodicalFormerNames: MicrosoftSystemsJournal, MicrosoftInteractiveDeveloper
PeriodicalUrl: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/
PeriodicalStatus: [Active]
From the above and numerous other wiki "topics", we can generate an automatic list of periodicals on dotNetInfluencers.org:, and/or many other lists. Now don’t those page properties look suspiciously like attributes or subelements of an XML element? I thought you’d think so… If you haven’t seen dotNetInfluencers.org, check it out. Browse around to get a feel for the site, and then add yourself and/or anything related to .NET. Better yet, if you’d like to help me build this site to the point we can define and public the XML Schema which is the purpose and goal of the site, send an email to mikes (at) xtras.net.
UPDATE: This project is no more and my email address has changed.
