Yesterday I got an e-mail from a recruiter; I get these pretty typically:

I came across your resume in a file of ours…. I am not sure if you are looking around anymore or not but I just partnered up with the company searching for a .NET engineer…

I am long over identifying as a “.NET engineer.”

Let me tell you how I got into this business. First, I taught myself Perl from a book—back when Perl was cool! Then, I taught myself Microsoft Access from book, and also from learning relational databases from the academic side in graduate school. With that I became a citizen developer, learning the programming language that came with Access, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). I leveraged that experience into jobs that required more serious development on the Microsoft stack, first in Visual Basic 6 and then in C# with the advent of .NET.

C# in particular is a great language and Microsoft despite all the criticism they’ve taken has made some great software. But while I’ve made actual money using Microsoft technologies, I’ve always envied the cool kids working on a LAMP stack or Plone or Django or Ruby on Rails. That is where this work becomes an art form. Or building iPhone apps.

Over the past few years I’ve gotten back to what first got me into technology in the ’90’s, web development. And, finally, I’m at a job where I’m not at all a Microsoft developer; I’m still running IIS but, conspicuously, without ASP.NET.

So no, I’m not interested in your old resume on file that says I’m a .NET Developer. Besides which if you can’t even look me up on LinkedIn and see what I’ve been doing since I talked to your agency ten years ago you’re not a very good recruiter anyway.

Oh, and that first database was to track custom imprinted B’Kol Echad orders. So that I was ever a Microsoft-stack developer was all caused by that other domain I am still passionate about.