Back in May I decided that I was going to start reading more. Admittedly my dedication to this has been nowhere near what Justice Gray's.
Since that first post I have:
- Read 3 and 8/3rds tech related books
- Listened to almost every .NET Rocks! (which I had already been listening to for a few years) and many of RunAs Radio shows
- Skimming the MSDN main feed for things that looked interesting.
- Reading 25 or so mostly development blogs, thankfully Ayende is the only one who averages more then one post per day or I would never get anything done.
- Reading through the source of a couple of open source projects I use, and submitted a patch to the Subtext project (hopefully it wasn't crap).
I have learned a lot.
Unfortunately it has been steadily reducing my job satisfaction. While some of it stems from working with a foundation I wrote in .Net 1.0 before having ever actually worked with tiered architecture, and I'm sure that a lot of it is also the "grass is greener on the other side" syndrome, I have been slowly noticing rather important deficiencies in my coding experience.
Chief among them are:
- No form of automatic testing or validation. This one probably isn't here for the reason that most people would think, because it improves code quality. Its here because having developers spend a day or two manually retesting a section of the program, rather then spending that day or two automating the testing seems to help Parkinson's Law when there is no impending next task.
- Platform backwards compatibility. While I completely understand why we need to still support SQL 2000, and completely agree with it too, it still makes me weep inside a little when I read the features in SQL 2005/8.
- Most of what I do has little value elsewhere. Admittedly most of this one is kind of my fault, but I'll plead ignorance as my excuse. My boss is rather adamant that we only use control that we develop, or the comes from Microsoft. And since with .Net 1.0 there was no AJAX support built in, we recreated just about every ASP.Net control again, most inheriting from WebControl (I really wish .Net had multiple inheritance).
- No real experience with cross browser support. This one is completely my fault, well 99.95% my boss did have to agree with it. For this one I plead Netscape 4.x and very heavy JavaScript/Dynamic HTML, and now there just is not enough justification to change it.
Now it is a very nice place to work, which combined with a rather intense dislike for job hunting means that I'm not highly likely to try to solve these problems by searching for a new job. Which might be a good thing, since it requires me to improve in areas outside of design/coding.
Hopefully I can avoid becoming the fictional guy who sent Dennis Forbes, and recently talked about on coding horror.