I am a .Net developer, mostly. Sure, I am exploring Python, node.js and other technologies, still my work is mostly related to C# and recently I am having fun with F#. I can say that as of now I am tied to one platform and I mostly attending meetups and conferences slightly related to it.

Recently I have gone to one of the meetups and I had opportunity to chat with awesome PHP programmers. Boy that was fun. MS technology stack for them is considered as an evil one, with evil solutions and evil approach to opensource. Just like my image of PHP is full of ‘script kids’ lack of software engineering etc. Of course that image is far from reality.

I was really surprised how .Net developers are perceived :

• we don't know framework details because intelisense is doing everything for us
• editor is doing everything for us, we are just drag n dropping controlsa
• MS stack is an evil panda
• we are using TFS because that's a technology from MS
• we are not trying other tools that the MS approved ones

As you can see the gap is huge. Now the problem is how to find a connection with someone from the other platform ? There is always a topic about domain,or other technologically independent stuff like DDD, TDD, BDD. But what about other stuff like tools ? Well we have Visual Studio and I have heard that PHPStorm from JetBrains is quite popular. Ahh there is git, yes git is fun and could be a source of endless discussion. What else … VIM, ha I am using Vim. It is so unusual that a .Net dev is a Vim fanatic that it might be this little cherry on top of the cake. They were really surprised. Even better I used emacs extensively on my university so legendary emacs vs vim discussion started. We shared our thought on vim, emacs tooling, I told them why i prefer Vim than Visual Studio.

What I learned. Hmm, I have to get out of my comfort zone more. One platform approach is a dead end. There are soo many people using different technologies that i might miss them or i wont be able to find a topic to talk to them. I have been also trying to follow rule, “Always say yes!” :) this one is hard to follow.

So whats next ?

• Swift - I would need a mac ... but finally i would have a nice topic to talk with @mihcall
• Rails and Ruby - this would give me a basis to talk to @andrzejkrzywda and @mpraglowski

A lot of choices, a lot people. In the end no matter what you choose there will always be someone interesting to talk to. So get up and learn some new technology, move out of your comfort zone. As a follow up to this topic, watch Martin Mazur talk from dev day 2012.