On C# and .NET

At my current job I've been using C# and VB.NET for development, which are two technologies that I had never used and really shied away from as they are "corporate" technologies. I always figured that C# was just like Java and since I hated Java when I was in university I would have the same reaction when trying out C# for the first time.

Turns out I was wrong. In a nutshell, I would describe C# as "Java done right". The extra features that come with C# are little things that make the language as a whole more pleasant to use, and doesn't make me want to cry when it takes forever to do something simple - as I usually felt when working with Java.

Here's a few of the things I like:
Type Inference - some people will probably hate my code. I use var everywhere. My code looks like Javascript! It's especially useful in foreach loops over dictionaries (aka hashes, I'm so used to using Ruby that I tend to overuse this class):

foreach (var pair in myHash){
  ...
}

This way if my hash has some complicated type I don't need to put KeyValuePair whenever I want to iterate over the collection.

Functional Abstraction - this one is also known as anonymous functions. Check this one out:

CSV.Open("mycsv.csv", "r", row => {
  .. do something to row
});

This is valid C# code! And it works great! It isn't exactly the same as blocks in Ruby (break/next/redo/return don't work the same) but it accomplishes a lot of what I use blocks for.

Events - this is the observer pattern built into the language. I won't go too much into this as you can just learn about it from the Wikipedia page. This is actually something that would be useful in Ruby (probably not that hard to implement as a gem) and is implement in Rails.

There are a number of things that I don't really like - the system is closed and very much owned by Microsoft. While they have their community promise thing going that means they say they won't sue the Mono guys for reimplementing their platform, you never know when they might try to exercise their muscle.

A quick note on Mono: it's great. The executables it produces are binary compatible with Windows, so you can pull the Java-style compile-once-run-everywhere thing - build an executable with Mono in Ubuntu, and it will execute under Windows - provided you're not using any specific libraries. Compile a .dll on Windows with Visual Studio and you can use it just fine in Mono under Ubuntu. I'm impressed.

Whiny Programmers

This post is in response to this rant here. If you don't feel like reading it that's ok, it is about a programmer who is annoyed about the following scenario:
1) Business Guy (BG) has an idea (I say Guy here because I've only ever been approached by guys with business pitches, but you can easily replace the G with Girl if that's the case).
2) BG finds Programmer (P), offers no pay but 50% equity.
3) P does all the coding, late nights, etc.
4) BG makes all the decisions, takes all the glory, no mention of P in press releases, etc.
5) P gets annoyed.

This is a common scenario, and a lot of programmers have seen it (I was lucky, when I went along with this scenario I was actually getting paid, although the equity part was lower).

My problem with this type of rant is this: what is stopping P and BG from being the same person? Why can't programmers come up with business ideas, and do all the marketing/PR/etc. as this rant describes as "the easy part"? This guy seems to come to the false dichotomy of "programmer in startup" vs. "programmer in big company", when there are plenty of other options available.

Now of course the obvious answer is this: there is not enough time for P and BG to be the same person. It's time-consuming enough to do all the coding, you want to do all the marketing and product pitches and all that too? On top of that, BG often has this thing called "charisma" (known to geeks as CHA) which is a thing that geeks often neglect or marginalize but is quite important when it comes to making people want to give you money for stuff (whether it's VC funding or selling your product).

Not only that but there is all this other business stuff that needs to be done like:
Market research: does anybody actually want your product? How often do us geeks embark on an awesome project only to find out that nobody actually wants it? /me raises both hands and would raise more if had more hands
Sales: how do you make more demand for what you're selling? People might not care at the moment, but could be convinced to care. How do you do that?
Financing: how are you going to pay the bills before the company turns a profit? Unemployment benefits? Not likely. Often you might have to get a loan or sell some equity to a VC/angel so that you can eat while you get the ball rolling.
Etc.: there are a lot of other things that come into play here, but I won't bore you with all those details since I think the three above are enough to make the point.
In short, my point here is that business is not as easy as this guy makes it sound.

What do you do when a business guy comes to you with a pitch? You might as well hear his idea out, it might actually be worth something - although if you're young like me your sense of what is worth something might not be fully developed yet, so keep that in mind as well. Sign the NDA if you need to, but don't make any commitment until you know what you're getting into. However the most important thing is to set a precedent: be assertive at the beginning. Say that if you're getting 50% of the equity then you're actually getting 50% of the company which includes 50% of the decision making, 50% of the exposure, etc.

Keep in mind though that this requires 50% of the responsibility - if the business fails, it's 50% your fault. If the business guy is doing something obviously stupid, it is your responsibility to let him know and work with him to make a better decision (or realize that maybe what he is doing isn't so stupid). You can't expect to be treated like a partner if you don't act like a partner.

Anyway, the two points I have are:
1) When you're in that situation where you're the developer of a 2-guy startup, assert your position as a partner or you won't be treated like one.
2) Remember that there are more options than "work as programmer for startup" or "work for big co" - namely, the "start your own startup" is a viable option. I think a lot of people forget about this when thinking about finding jobs.