Today is Thanksgiving in the USA, a time for reflection and gratitude for all of the joys in our lives. And while our staff will be busy showing our family and friends how much we appreciate them, several of them took a few moments to say what in they are thankful for in technology.
The new, reinvigorated Microsoft gets my thanks this year. I have bet my career on Microsoft and a during the Windows 8/SilverLight debacles, I was having a heart to heart talk with several close friends who had done the same. We honestly felt that that was the beginning of the end for Micrososft. We were seeing how fast our clients were abandoning Microsoft and were hoping we could pay our mortgages long enough to become experts on another stack before the bottom fell out completely. We estimated 18 months, max. As I sit here typing this in Visual Studio Code on OS X where I’ve been debugging an ASP.NET 5 application we want to deploy to Azure, you know how the story unfolded. This is the Microsoft I remember from the ‘90s where they were pushing boundaries and giving us all great opportunities but with the assholery and screaming match meetings removed. — John Robbins
The F# community for keeping the language going and creating a lot of great projects that also have great support. They are all also willing to share their ideas and experiences to everyone. The Xamarin community for always willing to help out in any questions that anyone has about the platform and providing guidance. — Jonathan Wood
I am thankful to be in a software industry that never stops innovating, that never stops moving, and that always keeps me interested and challenged. Every time I think that things seem to be stagnating, a new and unexpected wave of change comes through like a shot across the bow of a ship. It keeps me alive and interested and in awe sometimes at the pace of change. I’ve been around since close the beginning, when the first PCs came out, and the it’s been full speed ahead ever since. The birth of the personal computer, word processing and spreadsheets (see, I really am old), the world wide web and the fist web browsers, Quick C for Windows (uh, I mean Visual Studio), Windows 3.0, the .NET Framework, and on and on. More lately it’s been the iPad, the incredible speed of adoption of mobile and devices, modern web, and open source. It may sound like hyperbole but there has been no other industry like this in the history of our civilization, no other period that has made such drastic changes in the world, our individual lives, and our knowledge. I’m very lucky to be a part of it. — Todd Fine
I’m thankful for the Internet, because I don’t know how I ever coded without it. I’m also thankful for little things such as Visual Studio IntelliSense, because once more, I don’t know how I ever coded without it. — Jeff Prosise
I’m thankful for all the technologies that have made me love my career choice including: my TRS-80, my first IBM PC (with MS-DOS), 16-bit Windows, 32-bit Windows, C/C++/C#, the .NET Framework, and Azure. Sharing these technologies with others has allowed me to travel all over the globe experiencing new cultures – this has been an opportunity that I have always cherished. And, of course, all the fantastic people I’ve had the chance to work with over the years. Many of these people have become my closest of friends. — Jeffrey Richter
Happy Thanksgiving to all of our readers, clients, and friends.