While attending Oredev 2011, I had an interesting conversation with Corey Haines about his perception of the Ruby community as compared to the .NET community.

One thing he suggested is that the .NET community is seems a bit insular and self-isolating. He noted that when he attended .NET user groups, he only saw folks he knew to be .NET developers. But when he attends Ruby, Scala, NodeJS, Erlang, etc. user groups, he sees many of the same people at these meet ups.

While I’m not completely against identifying oneself as a .NET developer to indicate your primary focus, I do see what Corey is getting at. Rather than only seeing ourselves as .NET developers, it’s just as important to also see ourselves as software developers.

We should recognize that we’re part of this larger cosmopolitan software community. We have a lot to learn from this greater community. Just as importantly, our community also has much to offer to the larger community!

As a good friend once told me, a rising tide lifts all boats. The interchange of ideas between these disparate technology communities can only result in good things for everyone.

I’ve been grateful that folks such as Nick Quaranto have this view. Although he’s one of those hippie Ruby folks and runs http://rubygems.org/ (which some might see as a competitor to NuGet), he’s been extremely helpful and generous with advice for the NuGet team. To me, that’s what community is about. Not isolating oneself from ideas simply because they come from someone who’s eschewed curly braces.

The good news is that I think the .NET community is actually further along in this than it gets credit for. Podcasts such as Herding Code have a very polyglot bent to it. Even .NET Rocks, seen as the bastion of .NET, has expanded its archive with topics such as node.js and Modernizr recently.

So if you identify yourself as a .NET developer, well you’re in good company. There’s a lot of interesting .NET developers around. At the same time, I encourage you to reach across the aisle and learn a thing or two about a different technology. Maybe even hoist a beer with one of those hippie rubyists or smug clojure developers!

After all, someday we’re all going to end up as JavaScript developers anyways.