Saturday, October 25, 2008

Being a devigner can be hard...

Being a what? Well... Heather Solomon introduced this term a couple of years ago. I really agree with her that a SharePoint developer actually is a developer and a designer. On the one side this term makes my life a lot easier. Let me give you an example:

A: Hi, it's been a long time I saw you!
A: What are you doing for living?
B: I'm a SharePoint Developer
A: A what?

You can also say you are working with computers, but then most people will associate you with a salesman or a repairer ... like people in my neighbourhood think I'm a specialist in cleaning up some pc's, working with anti-virus software, etc. Looks familiar?

What if we had told A that we are a "devigner"? Do you think they will understand? Hehe... probably not. I think we just have to say "a software engineer" or for some of you "a software architect" or a "IT manager". But then they are probably not aware of that we also design some stuff. I give up :)

On the other side being a devigner is really hard. In that way that we have to deal with .NET (C#/VB), ASP.NET, SharePoint, CSS techniques and so on... We not only have to know when to dispose objects but also that css sprites are much better than separate images. We need so much knowledge that it is very difficult to become an expert in a specific domain. This fact is quite annoying but we all know SharePoint development is a steep learning curve - We have to deal with it ;)

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