Enterprise .NET: How do you keep in touch

[Pants]

Hello.

I was wondering, how do "good" developers keep their knowledge up to date in regards to using the best patterns, practices and technologies?

The problem I have is that we're a fairly small department, and not everyone has the appetite for learning new techniques. The industry is constantly moving and it seems so easy to get left behind. We don't often have uber-contractors working for us any more, so it's down to me too keep myself (and my team) up-to-date.

I have encouraged us to use MVC3, jQuery, BDD, Build Servers and all that sort of goodness. What's the next step, and how you make sure you're not left behind?

Anthony.

 

[UK-AL05]

I think most people don't. That's the problem. I've seen green field projects started with ancient technology.

 

[Shad]

Good developers try things out on their own, usually at home. 9-5 developers just do what they need to at work to get by. It will be very hard to change the habits of developers who aren't interested in taking their own career seriously.

 

[Mr^B]

I read blogs. Almost incessantly.

A few good ones to keep on top of new Microsoft technologies are:

Mike Taulty: http://mtaulty.com/communityserver/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/default.aspx
Jon Skeet: http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/
Scott Gu: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/
Ayende: http://ayende.com/blog

And I follow a number of people (such as the above, plus a few others)

@unclebobmartin (author of Clean Code, et al.)
@tastapod (Dan North, "inventor" of BDD)
@simonbrown (software architect)
@shanselman (scott Hanselman - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/)
@kevlinhenney (software guru type person, excellent speaker/presenter)
@gojkoadzic (software consultant type person, http://gojko.net/)
@Lunivore (http://lunivore.com/ - Liz Keogh, http://lizkeogh.com/ BDD proponent)

That's just a few of the most recently updated blogs/twitter feeds

The REAL key is to work with people who want to improve things as well, I had enough of 9-5 coders a few years ago and won't work with anyone who just does it for a living, you've GOT to be passionate about it, otherwise you'll get left behind...writing **** code, which I will then have to re-write...

 

[Haircut]

I'd say very similar things to what Mr^B has said, even if Ayende's blog is pretty much a sales pitch for RavenDB these days

In terms of blogs, Eric Lippert's Fabulous Adventures in Coding is an absolute gem.
Also, the Parallel Extensions Blog is normally very good.

I also read techie books or watch videos on the train during my commute, which I find useful.

As already said though, the key is working with good people. I went through a period a few years back where I was finding that my appetite for learning new things and staying a passionate developer was on the wane.
What helped with that was working on projects with other passionate people who cared about the code they wrote.

I'm a contractor now, so move around reasonably often, and the last couple of contracts I've worked with some great developers who have helped me stay passionate as well as helping me learn lots.

One of the things I'm interested in currently and have been doing some stuff on is functional programming.
I started a new contract a few weeks ago with a team of guys who are all into their functional programming and have a C# codebase that is written is a pretty functional way, so I'm looking forward to what I can learn in this contract.

 

[PCRHitman]

I would also agree with what Mr^B and Haircut have said. Working with the right people makes a lot of difference.

I'm quite lucky in the fact that i've recently started working for a company where the technical director & technical lead are not set in their ways. If a newer technology suits a new project better then they will learn it and use it.

But even with a very technology focused company, you still need to do some work yourself outside your normal 9-5. I did this by writing a blog engine. I went to DevWeek a couple of years ago, and one of the speakers said a very interesting thing. You need to practice writing code for the sake of practicing, don't just do the same thing over and over again but keep adding something new. He also said that to help this you should try writing a program that someone else has written, not for plagiarism or to market, but use someone else’s idea because it saves you having to come up with the idea yourself. i find the hardest thing about writing a program is actually coming up with the design spec and if you start to write an app with no idea what to write you never actually get round to doing it. So this is why i wrote my own blog engine, even though there are many out there, i wanted to write it myself, from scratch.

It was in writing this engine (http://www.tooks-net.co.uk)(unfinished, well saying that i'm not sure it will ever be finished) that i learnt ASP.NET MVC3, and then it was because of this knowledge i managed to persuade my boss to move our main web application to MVC3. So no i work with an MVC3 website which is half ASP.NET 4 and half MVC3 and slowly migrating towards a pure MVC3 website and had a lot of fun in the process.