I’m Important.

Since 9/11 and the decline of the economy, it became clear to me that I needed to do more than say “hey I’m an architect” and draw rectangles on a whiteboard to be relevant in today’s IT industry.

People like that are easily culled in the down-time and easily replaced.

5 years later, it dawned on me in a very Stuart Smalley way that “Gosh-darned it, I’m important!”. Not in a self-serving sense but in terms of the type of developer I represent.

Here’s concrete examples why:

a) I’m important to Adobe/Macromedia who are gearing up for a bloodbath between Flex and Microsoft’s Vista/Sparkle/Longhorn. Adobe likes people like me as they need developers/architects who are going to take their software, develop something with it, create a small-grassroots buzz and gain mindshare for their products.I’m typing this as I’m downloading 130MB of Flex builder Beta.

b) Amazon likes me as I leverage their Web services platform and have built a lot of stuff that again, helped them gain mindshare.
c) Microsoft likes me as I’m the type of person they’re going after for things like Mix’06 and so on.

d) Microsoft also likes me as they want to push things like Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation forward. I’m the kind of guy that’ll do that and bring them into major organizations day-to-day.

In the last year I’ve been in print (Business Week, Puget Sound journal, Visual Studio Developer Magazine), asked to speak at conferences (Interop 2005) and have been engaged by a leading publisher to write a book which may or may not happen.

So what’s more Web2.0 than me? I’m grass-roots. I’m trading sleep for xml, RSS for ZZZ. I’m bleeding edge and darn it people like me.

Lastly, who benefits most? My employer of course. They gain an employee who is constantly learning, experimenting and can speak with confidence on a set of topics not because I’ve read about them or attended a vendor demo but because I’ve used them first-hand.