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what the voices in my head tell me to write
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Its a different world out there
Rae and I went out for a meal at our favourite resteraunt last night. We got chatting to another couple in the bar and when they asked me what I did for a living they said "we are web developers too".
Then they asked who I worked for and like everyone else they have never heard of ingenta. I explained we are one of the biggest British run websites and get 13 million sessions a month etc. etc. etc. They said they do little websites in ASP for small businesses.
I was telling them I am responsible in our team for the web tier and their faces went blank... I mentioned IA and they asked "whats IA?"... Never heard of Ruby or Rails... vaugely aware of PHP and perl... At least they knew what HTML, CSS and Javascript are... though they do their "coding" in Visual Studio.
Then I mentioned the Future of Web Apps conference I went to last week and some of the speakers and their sites. They had heard of Yahoo and Google at least. (Must use MSN search...Must use MSN search...Must use MSN search... Bill tells us to) Never heard of flickr or del.icio.us or Web2.0 in general.
I dont know if I impressed them with my tales of open source web development and large scale sites, but I felt like a GOD compared to them. It felt like I was talking to the Borg. Sorry to use a Star Trek metaphor but its the most fitting.
Luckilly Rae could talk to Geoff who runs the place while I geeked out.
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Thursday, February 16, 2006