Using .NET Cost Me My Job

This story is an excerpt from my book, Don’t Say That at Work (Affiliate link). It is a collection of mistakes I made throughout my software development career and advice on how to avoid making similar ones yourself. If you would like to read more like this, please consider the complete book. You can also follow me on Twitter.

In 2005, the .NET Framework had its 1.1 SP1 release and was relatively stable. Visual Studio .NET 2003 was a solid release. C# was being widely adopted throughout the industry. Selecting it for a project cost me my job, and nearly sunk my career as a software developer.

This was almost two decades ago, so I feel comfortable discussing it now. I was working as a software developer at Hewlett-Packard in Nashua, New Hampshire, USA. HP had recently merged with Compaq, and absorbed the office buildings and personnel that were once Compaq, and Digital Equipment Corp. before that. Our project was called ActiveAnswers, a Content Management System (CMS) that existed before the term was coined.

When I joined Compaq in 2000, ActiveAnswers was a set of HTML templates and text files that were converted into a massive static web site every night. During the day, content editors would make changes by editing the text files. The site used dozens of Perl scripts to combine the content from the text files with the HTML templates.