Wednesday, January 02, 2008 2:18 AM
Mike Gunderloy, announced yesterday that the
December 31 issue of the Daily Grind would be the final issue of the famous link listing. Those who have been in the .NET space for a decent amount of time will recognize the Daily Grind as one of the staples of our day to day development news and will inevitably mourn this noticeable loss from our community.
Mike Gunderly, who I have all the respect in the world for, has made
no secret of his recent transition into the world of Ruby so this comes as no real surprise. However, it does beg the question of how can such an established platform as .NET with such a deep penetration of use lose such a major staple? As much as we could sit here and debate the "what does this mean for the .NET community" and "does this mean that .NET is on a decline", I've come to wonder lately if we're thinking about this in the wrong context.
Not discounting the usefulness of technology specific link listings, why do we necessary default to link listings that are focused on one particular technology? Aren't the true the fundamentals, the real groundbreaking work in our field technology agnostic? Yes, it's nice to know when a new version of
Ruby is released, or when
Telerik finally drops Prometheus, but I'm much more interested in the general lessons that people are learning regardless of the language or platform that they're living in. Maybe it's the fact that it's 2AM or it's the 2 glasses of wine I've had to help me finally collapse into that soft pillow of sleep, but am I crazy for thinking that there is more to learn from out there than the lessons that just live within the .NET space?
This is my challenge for the new year. I'm challenging every developer that reads this blog to reach outside of their home platform, to reach outside of their primary language, and altogether reach outside of their comfort zone and realize that the other languages out there have some great ideas as well. I challenge you to realize that other communities are developing some great techniques and that it's our responsibility as professional developers not to let those ideas pass us by.
Daily Grind, without a doubt you will be missed, and I'm forever indebted to Mike Gunderloy for the techniques and technologies that he has opened my mind to, but it's time for us to stop living in the silos of our own languages and platforms and see what the rest of the world has to offer.
Let's let 2008 be the year that we finally discover how to learn from each other.
