Steven W. Erbach
serbach at new.rr.com
Mon Mar 29 10:16:10 CST 2004
Dear Group, This is for the independent developers only. If you work for a company and you'd like to take the survey, just let me know that you're not an independent developer when you reply. I'm curious about what you independent developers have had to learn to keep up with the changing marketplace. 1) If you've managed to maintain a significant clientele by developing Access applications, what have you done to sharpen your skills to make you more attractive as the developer of choice in a competitive field? That is, have you developed a framework like JC, or have you gone more towards developing front ends for SQL back ends like Arthur? 2) If you've moved away from Access development as your primary source of income, what other platforms have you learned to make a living? Do you now do mostly .NET development, ASP, SQL Server, PHP, what? 3) If you're doing .NET development, what kind of things are you doing? Has it lived up to the hype? Last year about this time I was searching the want ads for positions before I decided to stick with my own business. I was amused by the ads that profiled the "ideal" candidate as one who had deep .NET experience. The stinking product had only officially been on the market for one whole year with another year in beta before that. Sheesh! Have you seen any real live .NET implementations that are worth bragging about...or have you created any? In short, what have you had to do to make yourself useful as an independent developer? I know that William works quite a bit with SBS and LANs. Have any of you developed proficiency with cabling and routers and such to increase your marketability? Do you do any security consulting, say? Do you build custom-order PCs? Do you do LAN management, e-mail server management and setup, web site development? One final thing: Years ago when I started I took advantage of the swing of the pendulum that put PC power in users' hands. That is, the PC was a great analysis tool for mainframe data. Lotus 1-2-3, dBASE III, Paradox, etc., were the tools that enabled users and departments to fiddle with the data without having to wait for the IT department to get around to their little pissant application requests. Now the pendulum has swung the other way. Security concerns and scalability and distributed networks / VPNs and web-based database applications have all made the pendulum swing back towards centralized control...and the IT guys are loving it. Or am I reading it wrong? What do you think? Regards, Steve Erbach Scientific Marketing Neenah, WI 920-969-0504 Security and Virus information: http://www.swerbach.com/security