Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by shouldbworking 3350 days ago
You are definitely in the majority among .NET engineers. Like everything it seems like people get pigeonholed into certain families of tech after being in the field for a while. Microsoft is one of those families, and so is Java.

.NET community ain't terrible, but it's nothing compared to Python and Java. I have tried to convince my co-workers of this fruitlessly over the years but basically all of them are .NET for life. There's no point in arguing that another product is better if the person you're arguing with has never seen it.

I used to share the same opinion as you until a few years ago when I got bored of making the same old .NET CRUD "line of business" apps at work. I decided to do some cool open source stuff that I always enjoyed reading about.

At first I wanted to use .NET but I quickly abandoned it after playing with Linux on AWS and learning about Cassandra, React, rabbitmq, elastic search, and Postgres. I had never even touched all of these great things. At an MS shop it's "SQL Server, SQL Server, SQL Server" for anything with even the slightest resemblance to data storage. Web development is "Angular" or "MVC" with little variation.

I started writing some cool open source stuff and realized I would be alienating myself from most of my users if I made it in C#. So, I picked up Java and never went back, at least at home.

I'm the only developer at our company out of ~35 that prefers Java over C# and the only one that contributes to free software. I don't think that correlation is a coincidence.
1 comments
GordonS 3350 days ago
It's true that I don't use Python or Java (although I have used it in the past - wasn't a big fan, and now C# seems so mch more powerful) and do use Typescript and (unfortunately!) Javascript. Python is something I do want to get into though, just to find out for myself.

There are some great .NET libraries for working with RabbitMQ, such as EasyNetQ, Chinchilla and more recently I'm loving RawRabbit. There are also good libraries for working with ElasticSearch, and I use Marten a lot for using Postgres as a document store (great library).

The place I work is indeed an MS shop, but we're all open minded and use other stuff occasionally at work, and quite often outside of work. Maybe we're in the minority there too though; I know plenty .NET devs who do have tunnel vision, but I suppose you get that across al languages.

link