Honestly, if your thirteen year old technology choices are still having an impact today, then you're doing the wrong thing regardless.
I started out with PHP, got whatever job I could which involved Access and VBA, then VB.NET, then C#... now I use JavaScript, Python and occasionally Ruby.
That isn't to say that you should know six different languages. But you should know programming well enough that you can apply your skills wherever you need to.
Every choice you make impacts you today. What you learned in high school, college, and at your first few jobs all shape who you are and what you know. If I wouldn't have spent those years in ASP.NET. I know programming, have the same skill set as you pretty much (no Python). I would have loved to be increasing my Ruby/JS skills during the "lost years" doing ASP.NET.
Sorry you feel that you "lost years" doing ASP.NET. I did some COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, C, C++, VB, and Delphi during a period of two to four years and don't feel they were "lost years". In fact it was all fun. Would I be better off if I had done something different? I guess I will never know...
They were lost in that nothing I did with ASP.NET (not MVC) has translated to what I'm doing today. No patterns, no habits, no tooling, nothing. COBOL/FORTRAN are languages and I'm not sure they correlate here - but maybe top-down design ripples still? :):). I learned a lot in Pascal - mostly how to comment things :)
Well, I'm ok with having wasted some of my years in technology that has nothing to do with what I want to do today. I read your blog, watched some of your Tekpub productions, downloaded and used some of your code (massive) in a project, and have been following you on the Internet for quite a while. Honestly, for someone that lost ten years of his life you are doing fine. I downloaded biggy today and will be checking it out -- thanks for your contributions.
>Honestly, if your thirteen year old technology choices are still having an impact today, then you're doing the wrong thing regardless.
Really? If you don't randomly flit from fad to fad you are "doing the wrong thing"? What if I made a good choice 15 years ago? Should I have stopped using postgresql simply because I chose it so long ago?
Really? If you don't randomly flit from fad to fad you are "doing the wrong thing"?
That wasn't what I suggested at all. My point is that you shouldn't be so focused on one language that you can program in that and that only. Even just being bilingual is a massive step forwards in overall programming skills rather than ASP.NET skills, or PHP skills, or...
Obviously I can't tell what you meant to say, but it is what you did say. "If your thirteen year old technology choices are still having an impact today, then you're doing the wrong thing regardless". My thirteen year old technology choices are still having an impact today. You explicitly said I am "doing the wrong thing". I believe that is incorrect.
I started out with PHP, got whatever job I could which involved Access and VBA, then VB.NET, then C#... now I use JavaScript, Python and occasionally Ruby.
That isn't to say that you should know six different languages. But you should know programming well enough that you can apply your skills wherever you need to.