.NET Free for 365 Days 12
Time flies. One year ago, I announced I would be leaving my cushy .NET architect job in favor of working with Rails full-time.
When I left my full-time job, I honestly didn’t have much of a plan. I just knew I was ready to the trade the comfort of the enterprise .NET world I was working in for something riskier, but ultimately more fulfilling (and fun). The idea was to spend more time concentrating on my the small business I was already building on the side (sales software for the hotel industry) while filling in the gaps with Rails contract work, if it was available.
Lessons learned
I’ve been developing for the web since college (1995!), but I’ve never spent the time to really learn crap about Linux. That has changed a lot. As we’ve mentioned before, if you’re not comfortable finding your way around a *nix shell, that’s going to be the biggest barrier to a fruitful career developing web apps with Rails. The same holds true with the tools commonly used by non-Microsoft developers -- subversion, apache, etc.
And, there’s no better way to become comfortable with this new environment than to dive right in. In fear of starting the PC/Mac holy wars once again, I’ll just say that it helps if you learn to work on Mac or Linux, as you’ll be forced to quickly learn a lot of commands that you probably didn’t in the Windows world. I probably haven’t used Windows for about six months, and I don’t miss it.
Business-wise, my consulting rate is a bit lower than my .NET rate ever was. But I’m fine with it, because I really am having more fun and am happier on a day-to-day basis with the work I’m doing.
And the verdict is...
In short, I’ve been busier than I could have ever imagined. I’ve finished converting my company’s products from .NET to Rails, and business is good. On the consulting front, I’ve spent most of 2007 working on various Rails development projects for a large systems integrator based in Japan, and helping a startup here in Chicago with their Rails development efforts. I’ve also been hacking away slowly on Coastr, and have some new personal projects up my sleeve as well (stay tuned). All while Jeff and I have been quietly building what we hope will be a successful Rails training offering.
Throw in the fact my wife and I just had our second baby girl (pair programming now possible), and that’s one busy, no, a blur of a year.
Congratulations on all that you've accomplished! I REALLY want to switch from ASP to RoR, but I never have the time to convert everything over. I have soo many nice functions and a pretty decent framework for kicking out websites with just a few clicks of a mouse. Combine those websites with some design/CSS and voila... website!
I'd love to come to your conference, but that weekend I'll be out of town. What other resources would you recommend and/or do you plan on having any "after the conference" videos or notes. I'd be willing to throw down if I could learn in 2 days! Hell, even 2 weeks!
It's funny but I've been asking 30% more since I started doing rails. Mind you I was doing php before.
Are you sure you couldn't be asking for more than you currently are? I know in Montreal I ask for more than most .NET developers.
Tyler: sorry that you can't make it... we'll definitely will be posting a post-event recap, so stay tuned.
Gary: yeah, I guess it's different for everyone. Bear in mind I was really an "enterprise" .NET developer, working for some pretty big companies with deep pockets. And now, I'm working for startups and smaller companies and doing more "one-off" web projects. Or, maybe I need to move to Montreal ;)
Hey dude. Big ups for leaving the corporate .NET "enterprise" world, my man. I broke the love affair (so to speak) with .NET around the same time as you (as you are already aware (so I'm not sure why I'm telling you again (but I guess it's just to say congrats))), and I have to say: it feels damn good!
Keep up the great work homes.
Congrats on all you've accomplished in the past year, but biggest congrats on your new baby girl! Work can be fun, but nothing beats being with your kids and having fun watching them grow up. :)
Congrats, great to see some other .NET developers has seen the light about ASP.NET. Anyways, I'm working towards making the same jump in the next 12 months. Thanks for the tips...
It must be nice to be able to continue to do it. In September of last year, I was able to make an acquaintance of a venture capitalist that was unhappy with his current tech team. He was in the affiliate marketing space and very successful over many months. So we (myself and two other developers) thought we struck gold, formed a corp, quit our day jobs (after a couple months of developing at night), and worked for ourselves. I convinced my two tech partners to write the various web sites in rails. It was great, no a phenomenal experience. We produced software at a faster rate than I have with any other web application framework. Plus, rails supported over 5,000 hits a day (on heavy ad days) with no issue. Just awesome...
After many months, we ended up making about a ¼ of what we could make in the corporate world. We had failed financially and had to go back. Last week, I had to accept a .NET lead position, as there were no real rails opportunities in my area (around Philly). It has been soooo painful, I want to rip out all their websites and convert them to rails. Today, I had to change their code based on schema changes, for each schema change I had to modify 8 files minimum because of their “framework”. It’s a modified version of what is in the book “ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design – Solution”. Actually, its not that bad of a way to layer your application, but after using rails it all seems superflous. Plus they have the dba group handle all the schema updates in ALL the environments, including dev. Grrr.
It’s really tough out there for a rails developer... You mentioned the financial issue. For example, fulltime it’s about $100,000 – $120,000 for .net and $60,000 – $80,000 for rails, contract it’s about $60 – $80 for .net and $30 – $50 for rails (these are about the averages I have seen). These are my unsubstantiated estimates and assume you are not working for yourself. Can I really justify turning down an $115,000 a year position for a $75,000 a year rails position. Ouch, ouch, I feel a pain in my chest…
Anyway congratulations on your success, use rails, love it, I miss it everyday.
Cheers, JF
First, congrats.
But you confirm one of my concerns about changing platforms. I've grown into a solid senior .Net dev/lead with some architecture under my belt too. I'm a contractor and I do pretty decent as far as compensation goes.
My biggest annoyance is really Windows. I'm otherwise happy with Office, but not completely satisfied by .Net.. it's good; just seems like I could be having more fun and be more productive.
I could do Ruby/Rails, but making a jump would most certainly mean a significant decrease in income.
For those still in the .Net world, do yourself a favor and check out http://castleproject.org/. Especially if you work with asp.net. /heading to the forum to read more conversion stories.
I've left my permanent .NET job to become a RoR entrepreneur. I can't explain how liberating it is. :)
Great to hear .NET folks trying out nix and Rails. I've been doing .NET at work and Rails/nix at home. The latter seems so much more fluid to me that I not only preferr, but enjoy it. Keep it up!
O\T BTW, love the litte OS/browser icons. It tagged me as Linux (correct) and IE (incorrect). I'm on a Nokia n800 right now, so I'm using Linux and I think the browser is a variant of Opera for mobile devices, but I'm not sure on that. It may be created by maemo.org. Cheers!
First, congrats on the second baby - I've got two girls as well, 3yrs and 1yr, and they are wonderful.
Second, I, erm, second your thoughts about diving right in. I barely touched a command prompt in the last few years of programming, and now that I'm getting fired up about RoR I'm much more adept at using it, and prefer to in some cases.
I've done freelance PHP work in the past and really enjoyed it, though ultimately went back to work for someone else because of the cost of healthcare for an IBO. I'm toying with the idea of going at it again, though this time focusing on RoR development. So, it's nice to read about your success story. Thanks for sharing :)