As you probably already know, I live on a tiny island just off the French coast. Many of you might not realise just how small it is - about 78 square kilometers in total and about 62,000 people. The upside is the quality of life is a lot better than many places, one of the downsides is that a small population and a significant economic skew towards financial services means there aren’t that many software development people about. I know that I’ve often felt rather isolated and wondered how many other people worked in this field locally - I knew a few, and I luckily got to work on larger teams in the UK mainland fairly regularly in my previous job, but overall the perception was that our profession was quite marginalised, with most IT demand being for network / server administrators, desktop support and managers. Certainly when attending local BCS meetings the subject matter was mostly oriented to that. It’s one of the reasons I appreciate the Internet so much, since there I can be a active member of a huge community.
Last night however I attended a meeting of the Guernsey Developers User Group, which was actually quite well attended. I knew a few people there already but there were quite a few people I didn’t know, and a larger group than I expected, so that’s a good sign. And best of all, the presentation subject matter has a good chance of actually being relevant to our developer existences 
I’ve volunteered to get involved to help it keep going, and started posting things on their site, as has Damien, and hopefully it will continue.
Due to the local emphasis on financial services I get the impression the vast majority of attendees are using .Net/SQL Server on various business projects, and as such what I do is likely to come across as a bit, um, weird (unless they’re busy making “3D Investment Growth Planning Warrior” and I’m just not aware of it - it could happen). But all the core skills are the same, as I’ve learned transferring my skills from business development, so I expect it will be a useful forum.
January 26th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Sounds like fun, wish I could find a developers group closer to where I live.
Mingling amongst some .NET locals could give you some useful insight into it’s real world use and it’s strengths and weaknesses. Also, your experiences with J2EE could lead to an opportunity to do a presenation and sway some folks away from the darkside.
XNA has a long ways to go, but is beginning to show some promise and improves performance over MDX. Any chance you’ll run into any XNA developers to get their feedback?
January 26th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Hehe, well I already know a few .Net developers anyway, we have some interesting debates about open standards versus the productivity of ultra-tight integration with one platform.
I know someone who’s tinkered with XNA a bit. So have I, and my initial impression was ‘meh’ - interface wise it felt exactly like Managed DirectX, which isn’t exactly a revolution. You still have to layer a ton of stuff on top of it to become productive it seems. If some good libraries and tools get ported to it it could be interesting later.
January 27th, 2007 at 1:55 am
Well I’m hoping to be a developer over here when I finish university. I can see myself ending up in C# or some other .NET stuff but I’d prefer to stick with Java dev work if it was in the industry. I quite like both really.
My main ambition is to work in C++ however I’m not sure if a) I’d be highly skilled enough and b) if the industry would be using it. I’m not entirely sure on the status of languages used over here in Guernsey. I know you work in Java and pretty much every job I’ve seen advertised for coders is either in C# or Java. Most industries over in England tend to employ fresh out of uni employees nowadays. My company certainly does and it’s one of the largest software corporations in the world.
Locally though I only know of two developers, and that’s you and damieng. Well, I don’t really “know” damieng, but I think I may have met him once.
I could always go straight into freelance, but I’d actually prefer a low-wage coding job for real experience for a while just to build myself up. I feel like a pawn in the game really, especially seeing how knowledgeable the devs are at my work. I’m so sure that there’s nothing that they don’t know