What influences you to use a technology?

I personally think being labelled as a .NET developer your entire career is really limiting and speaks volumes about your unwillingness to experiment and learn new things. Don’t get me wrong .NET is wonderful but it feels as if you have to have the “.NET mindset” for everything, and that usually means that if you’re a true blue Microsoft zealot — everything that comes from Microsoft is seen as gospel. Use data access? Entity Framework is everything to most .NET developers and their entire reason and existence as a .NET developer revolves around it. Again Entity Framework is not bad — its just its not the only way to do data access. You should not limit your exposure to an exclusive way of doing things — why not write your own data access layer using some of C#’s dynamic features (opposed to using boring ADO.NET). If you get too set in your ways because you are using something like Entity Framework how on earth are you going to uncover new C# language features? Entity Framework is a layer of abstraction that does a lot of things for you, that most developers don’t bother learning anyway. I mean all you do is create your domain models, point it to a database and voila? Okay that was a bit of a rant.

But seriously though — being labelled as a .NET developer is okay I guess and might not imply an unwillingness to try other languages and frameworks, but in my experience many .NET developers won’t touch any other tech stack because they are so comfortable with what they are using. Are you as a developer willing to look at something like Django (opposed to ASP.NET MVC)? We all know .NET developers love ASP.NET MVC to bits — I mean it really is really good at what it does. But what if you are faced with a scenario where you cannot have Windows hosting (and yes I know ASP.NET Core can run on Linux) and you have to use a Linux-based hosting solution. What then? Can you justify the cost and expense of a Windows Server for your project(s)? I’m busy with a small sideproject at the moment and I’m stuck between choosing a tech-stack for it. On the one hand I want to use ASP.NET MVC because I am really familiar with it and can get things up and running fairly quickly, but on the other hand I know that if I took the time to learn another tech stack I might just be better off for it. This is not a call to abandon .NET but much rather to open my eyes to other things. When it comes to databases my general feeling is that MySQL (MariaDb) and PostgreSQL run better on Linux-based systems. With both these databases you get a free database management system that does not suffer from the limitations of SQL Server Express or the cost impact of full-blown SQL Server. SQL Server is great but its not always the appropriate choice — if I were to build a web app with some sort of data persistence I would really be intrigued to check out MariaDb or PostgreSQL, on Linux. And as a web framework I am really interested to checkout frameworks that use Python. Why Python and not PHP? Python is an ubiquitous language that is available with very little effort (if any) on Linux servers and it can be used to perform almost any function — from building web apps to running scheduled tasks to running any code you need to run on the server. It feels as if Python is much closer to C# in its multi-purpose manner. The only thing that is a bit of a hurdle is that I’m not as well-versed with Python as I am in C# so there is almost a tendency to want to rather use ASP.NET MVC. But apart from Python being a multi-purpose language there are several other reasons for choosing it:

What influences your choice of technology? In my case above I highlighted that my choice is firstly determined by not wanting to be seen as a one-trick pony. Secondly I identified that Python is more cost effective due to the reduced costs of Linux servers and the availability of database management systems such as PostgreSQL and MariaDb. Thirdly I also identified tools and language features as a reason for choosing Python, in this case. I also mentioned that Python is fairly general purpose.

When choosing a technology do you go through an exercise of identifying why you want to use it before you start using it?

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