One of the things I enjoy the most about being an industry analyst is that I've spent the past six years meeting some great developers. Personally, I’m not sure I could cover any other technology area then application development. The reason is simple: I see developers as a worldwide force for good (It's almost axiomatic, as the bad apples become "hackers"). Developers innovate, they create, they push technology forward — and they are fun to go have a beer with at the end of the day.

While writing for developers is fun, it’s not always easy. For the past few years, my topic coverage areas have sometimes felt a bit disjointed — almost as if there are two different developer communities out there that I deal with. In the past, I've referred to these groups as the "inside the firewall crowd" and the "outside the firewall crowd." The inquiries I have with the first group are fairly conventional — they segment as .NET or Java development shops, they use app servers and RDBMSes, and they worry about security and governance. Inquiries with the second group are very different — these developers are multilingual, hold very few alliances to vendors, tend to be younger, and embrace open source and open communities as a way to get almost everything done. The first group thinks web services are done with SOAP; the second does them with REST and JSON. The first group thinks MVC, the second thinks "pipes and filters" and eventing. I could go on and on with the comparison.