2006: The Year I Ignore Microsoft

Anyone that knows me can pickup on two traits I've had, for better or worse, since I was a kid: I'm very passionate about whatever I do, and I'll crazy/insightful/downright stupid to try anything once. As such, I'm launching a yearlong research project to expand my own talents. 2006 will be a calendar year in which I completely ignore Microsoft.

Before you crack your knuckles and ready a flame comment, consider my reasoning. I'm expanding my skill set and seeing how the other 66% of the world operates, in the interest of becoming a better Microsoft developer. I want to experience new ways of thinking, new technologies and new UIs that MS just doesn't do at the moment for whatever reason. But I can't learn-and-apply the concepts towards my ASP.NET work in parallel - I need full, uninterrupted immersion. Consider this a programmer's platform sabbatical.

Like many reading this, I'm a Microsoft web developer. I rock out to ASP.NET, C#, ADO.NET, SQL Server and a few other tools. I've spent thousands of hours interacting with really cool people in mailing lists, forums, sites, and communities provided for us. And like many of you, I developed the MS myopia, neglecting the rest of the world. I'm also keen on enjoying the Web without worrying about viruses, worms or malware.

I'll still be doing ASP.NET development at work (this I can't avoid with '06 being an election year), but at home it's all open source. I've asked that my MVP status not be renewed, which the coordinator reluctantly agreed to do, not truly understanding why. I've also cancelled my MSDN subscription and my subscription to MSDN Magazine, neither of which I rarely use. I've removed myself from all the listservs, newsgroups and RSS feeds having to do with MIcrosoft development. It's like I'm being reborn.

I'm buying a Mac OS X laptop to be used primarily for the purpose of developing web applications with Ruby on Rails. I'm adopting LAMP stacks in most of my R&D work these days (with Python). Outside of Flash, I'm picking up several new languages and platforms. I've honestly got no reason to implement .NET 2.0.

This shouldn't surprise those of you who know me already...I've been going the open source route for the last few months to ween myself away from what's become my comfort zone. It started earlier this year when I took up podcasting and realized all the cool work that didn't involve the DataGrid. And I was bummed that in many aspects of what made '05 such a great year to be online - Microsoft was sorely out of the picture.

Let me be completely honest and admit that because I began to dabble in open source in 2005, I also got really dejected about Microsoft, which led to my temporary exodus. It had no publicized presence for podcasting, was out of the loop in regards to Web 2.0, had a couple of shining moments with future plans for RSS, and got the snot kicked out of it by Google and Yahoo! For once, the other side looked attractive...and it didn't involved having to be a Java and/or PHP guru to get it done.

I'm going to dive deep into the open source movement and really experience the Web. I'll come back in '07, hopefully stronger, wiser and with a renewed philosophy for development.