“Jack of all trades, master of none” - old saying of indeterminate origin
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” - Jesus
For the past two years, I’ve been splitting my time between .Net and Ruby on Rails projects, depending on what my clients at the time were asking for. The rationale for this bifurcation was that a paying client is better than no client at all, and since I didn’t have enough Rails work to sustain my business, I kept doing .Net work (which was not a bad thing) and also kept soliciting .Net work, which I think was ultimately detrimental.
You see, by not putting all of my business development eggs in the Rails basket, my efforts were seriously diluted, to the point that I not only had no significant presence in the Rails community, but no significant presence in the .Net world as well. In other words, my marketing efforts didn’t pay off. My work schedule is largely open, partly due to the shaky economy, but in large part due to my lack of focus.
So, if I’m forced to choose one or the other, why Rails? Why not .Net? Simply put, I enjoy working with Rails. As far as .Net goes, I like C# as a language, but the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem has become so bloated that it sucks the life out of the developer who just wants to get something built. (Seriously, take a look at the ASP.Net MVC project - it’s better than ASP.Net WebForms, but it’s still a train wreck compared to Rails.)
So today, I’m drawing my line in the sand. I am henceforth focusing 100% of my marketing and business development efforts on the goal of becoming a 100% Rails development shop. As long as my schedule is open, I’ll do .Net work, but I’m not going to actively seek it out.
This, of course, is a risk. I have a family to feed and bills to pay, which means I have to maintain a certain level of cashflow. In western Washington, there is a strong Microsoft bias, which means .Net is more in demand. But it can be done, and I’m going to do it.
So, if you have a Rails project that needs doing, drop me a line, OK?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Even for those clients who might come to you seeking .NET development, try to sell them on Rails! Show them how much faster you can develop in RoR, how much cheaper (can’t beat free!) your development software is, how much more flexible. Especially if you pitch your RoR dev skills at a slightly lower rate for the time being, you can hopefully start moving more of those existing eggs into the RoR basket (to abuse the pun).
Kudos to you for making the leap!
About 3-4 months ago I was in the same boat (just PHP instead of .NET). I finally started to tell my customers that I only going to offer Ruby but I would finish up their current projects and help transition them to a maintenance team. Since then I’ve been taking a more active role in some large Ruby projects and am starting to attract a lot of Ruby projects.
I’m proud so say in 2009, I’ve only written Ruby (and JavaScript).