My Development History

Based on an interesting post with a link to styled résumés I got to wondering what my development history would look like if I plotted it out.

I pulled out my résumé and dumped my language experience into Excel.  While I have exposure to many technologies (Crystal Reports, ActiveReports, PHP, third party SDKs, IIS, Apache, Exchange, Squirrel, DNS), platforms (Windows, Mac, flavours of Linux), databases (Oracle, MySql) and Languages (Java, c++, Delphi) I found that it was most clear if I charted the top two languages at any time.

Excel 2010 quickly whipped up a series of charts for me.  I ‘capped them quickly and spent a couple of minutes styling it up in PhotoShop. It’s crude because I only spent about 20 minutes on it.

I tried to reflect that most languages built up as a primary, but in late 2005 I switched projects, started using C# and haven’t touched VB.NET much at all ever since (the exception being maintenance).

 (click chart to see a larger version)

As an overlay representing my time in SQL Server I’ve added a black shaded bar.  My responsibilities in SQL Server admin, stored proc development and the link have continued to grow and advance in complexity since 2000.  Today, however, where I spend a lot of time in SQL development is in the import/export scripts as we transition from the legacy system.

Below the timeline I added the language that I had been using the second most often.  After doing this it occurred to me that C# has graduated to my longest running language and will be, by next year, my longest running primary language as well.  Not counting T-SQL, of course.

At some point I would love to add to the chart my primary development environment as well.  …but that would take a bit of time and my break is over ;o).

What is not reflected on the chart is that prior to 1997 my primary development was non-MS based as I used Turbo Pascal and Delphi.  Loved the DOS, baby.