It struck me the other day that I have greatly missed contributing to open-source projects on a more significant scale than I have managed lately. Part of what hit me was that, while I felt that I had learned a lot from a technical knowledge standpoint in the past couple years, I hadn't grown as a developer as much as I'd hoped and I think a good chunk of that can be attributed to the change in the nature of my personal open-source contributions. It turns out that while you can read books and develop projects at your particular place of work, there is no substitute, in my opinion, for contributing to some of the community open source projects in terms of what they can teach you. Let me explain.

Every now and then, usually in the middle of a debate between competing technologies such as .Net and ColdFusion or Silverlight and Flex, someone will espouse the idea that you should choose the technology that best fits the problem rather than our particular personal technology preference. Generally speaking, everyone will agree as this sounds like a perfectly reasonable ideal. However, I am writing this post to cal "bullsh*t" to that sentiment and defend the idea that people should feel free to stick to their guns and defend their personal technology preferences. Here's why...

For today's blog topic I want to stray from my usual programming tutorials and open-source updates to something I have been giving a lot of thought to lately: my career as a developer. I wanted to share my thoughts and hear from other people who may be in a similar situation in their careers. Here's the scenario... I have built a good career over the last 12 years, first as a ColdFusion developer exclusively, then a manager/developer and, for the past 5 or so years, back to being a straight developer specializing in both ColdFusion and, more recently, Flex (for the record, I started my development career doing Flash and Director stuff). I've worked hard to build a solid portfolio and a great network and generally love what I do for a living. Nonetheless, I am left wondering, what is the next step career-wise or is there a dead-end on the developer career path?

For the record and for you recruiters, I am not looking to leave where I am, just looking ahead. Even my current boss asked me what my career goals are and it was a question to which I had no good answer.

One thing that my years as a manager taught me, its that I don't want to be a manager. It's not that I can't handle it and, in fact, I think I did pretty well at it, but I just don't enjoy it. It's always seemed to me an odd paradox of developers that the next step for a developer seems to be a career as an IT manager even though writing code does not seem to be a great preparation for managing people and/or projects or dealing with the many other issues (payroll, personnel issues, etc) that managers are often tasked with. Many developer friends I have spoken to about this topics seem to believe that, at their companies, you either move on to management or you just stay where you are...indefinitely. That seems to me a depressing choice to make at 35.

I've met some folks who have been able to move up to positions as "architects," a position that seems to stay grounded in code but take a higher level view of projects and requirements. This sounds like an interesting career move, but honestly these types of positions seem extremely rare. Most companies I have had experience with are just in the process of updating their development practices and honestly wouldn't know what to do with an architect.

I'm sure there are others out there who are facing similar dilemmas in looking ahead at their careers as I am. I'm happy to invest the time and money on training or even going back to school to move my career forward over the coming years...but before you can commit to something like that, you need a goal in mind. I have (half-)joked that I have a 3 year plan to move my career to the next level, with the first step in that process being figuring out what the next level is.

That's my situation. So what's your career goal and how do you see yourself getting there?

This is a topic I have been giving a lot of thought to lately, even before and unrelated to the continuing Apple versus Adobe saga. Its been my sense, especially lately, that the Adobe Developer Community is a very introverted community and this trait continues to hurt how we are viewed within the developer community as a whole (for what its worth, I am speaking about ColdFusion, Flex and Flash developers since these are the areas with which I have experience though admittedly less within Flash specifically). This post is my attempt to open a discussion on that topic and suggest some ideas on how to change it.

My morning workshop on the second full-day of FOWA Miami 2010 covered Facebook connect. The room felt a little like a basement with a very odd L-shaped configuration and there was a relatively small attendance at first, perhaps with many people still recovering from the party the night before at the Clevelander (not surprisingly, people streamed in late as the session was ongoing). Ryan Merket (@merket), the speaker, used to work at Facebook (left weeks ago I believe) and co-founded ping.fm. He also built the first site that utilized Facebook Connect.