The tech world is all abuzz with the news that techcrunch just got acquired by AOL. Techcrunch, for those who don’t know, is one of the go to tech blogs for all that’s happening in silicon valley. Sometimes it’s a little too much insider talk, like the recent angelgate, but overall techcrunch has its finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the tech world.

It seems that they review nearly every startup under the sun and post an amazing number of scoops each day. What’s even more amazing is that for many years it was run by one man who built it up from nothing — Mike Arrington. Now, some would say that Mike is arrogant jerk and there may be some truth to that, but you gotta love his work ethic.

Inc magazine recently did a profile of Mike in their "The Way I Work" series and here are some gems from that article:

A year ago, I’d work until I passed out, and wake up eight or nine hours later, which might be 4 p.m. or 3 a.m. Then I’d work again until I passed out. That was my life for four years—it got really bad. I missed a lot of social things. I didn’t keep up with friends. I was a mess. I actually gained 50 pounds in the five years since I started TechCrunch.

How can someone not be successful with that kind of work ethic? He’s going for the blitzkrieg of tech blogging — winning by overwhelming force. It reminds of an old chinese proverb "No one who can rise before dawn 365 days a year fails to make his family rich"

Another thing I noted from the article is how he eliminates distractions in his writing:

My office is like a cave. I have blackout shades on the windows. I like the dark. There’s less distraction. I use a Mac with two 24-inch monitors, and I’ll do research on one screen and write on the other. It’s more efficient. I’d love to have three monitors, but Macs support only two. I have the exact same setup in my office in San Francisco…I like working late at night. There are no interruptions. I usually listen to music when I write. I like hard music that is not happy music—Metallica, Eminem, Rage Against the Machine.

I love the idea of him writing like crazy in cave with Rage Against the Machine cranking, and I could see how that would be motivating. A friend of mine always used to run to Marlyn Manson and pretend that he was running from the singer, so I think there’s definitely something to that.

Anyway, congrats to Mike Arrington and here’s hoping that others can succeed by applying the same overwhelming force!

Visual Studio is a great IDE. In fact, Xcode is finally starting to catch up with its latest release. That said, sometimes Visual Studio is just a little too much. Sometimes I just want to go in and make minor code changes without firing up the 800 pound memory sucking gorilla that is VS.NET.

And that’s where vim comes in. I once heard someone say that vim is a text surgeon. It is precise and efficient in its job. And it’s optimized for just one thing — editing text. There’s a beauty and simplicity to vim, especially if you value lightweight precision and want to do everything with the keyboard.

The problem is that editing ASP.NET code in vim can be painful because it’s important to be able to compile and test in a browser. Not to mention you spend a lot of time going from the view template to the code behind files.

Luckily, vim supports an amazing plugin ecosystem, so I finally took the time to incorporate all my vim asp.net scripts into a true plugin called aspnetide.vim. It’s available now at the vim site and github.

Here’s what my plugin gives you:

• Build Solution – Find the solution file and build the project with msbuild. Errors are displayed in the vim quickfix window.
• Online Doc – Press F1 on any word and it will look it up in MSDN for you.
• Jump to Code Behind – If you are editing the view template, you can quickly jump to the corresponding code behind file and vice-versa.
• Show App in Browser – Similar to pressing F5 in visual studio. This will start up your local web server and pop a browser pointing to the selected page.

The Caveats and Credits

The script far from perfect at this point, but at least it makes editing ASP.NET in vim much better.

For the future, I hope to make the plugin more portable. At this point, a few of the features only work on windows because they depend on the local dev web server installed with visual studio.

If you are an ASP.NET developer that is looking for a lighter weight editing tool or someone who would like to totally abandon the mouse for the efficiency of the keyboard, I encourage you to try it out or even fork it and improve it.

Special thanks goes out to:

• Kevin Berridge who pointed the way toward editing c# in vim with a great series of blog posts.
• Rob Conery for pushing .NET developers to look beyond what they’re used to.
• TPope for showing just how awesome a vim plugin can be with rails.vim.

On a trip to Hawaii this summer, I talked to a couple of other tourists who had been to Hawaii multiple times. I wondered what kept bringing them back. They had been to the Caribbean as well and though the weather was also beautiful it didn’t have the same culture as Hawaii. It was the culture they said that influenced the entire trip and was almost more important than the place itself.

I think it’s much the same with programming languages. When you choose a programming language to work in, you get a lot more than just its syntax strengths and weaknesses. You also get the development culture that goes with that language, and I would argue that culture is more important.

I’m reminded of Paul Graham’s article that all the interesting work is now being done in Python:

Hence what, for lack of a better name, I’ll call the Python paradox: if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they’ll be able to hire better programmers, because they’ll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don’t learn merely to get a job.

Note that he didn’t say that interesting work was being done in Python because of the features it supported. Instead it was because of the culture of the people who learned the language.

I still spend the majority of my time as a .NET developer, but as I’ve started to experiment with Ruby on Rails (and corresponding technologies of Linux/VIM) I feel like I’m starting to really understand the culture that goes with .NET and Rails.

Microsoft .NET – The biz guys

In my experience Microsoft developers are the most business focused of the language camps (except for possibly Java). They tend to focus on quick, practical solutions and worry less about code purity.

In many ways this is good because you don’t lose sight of adding business value, but it can result in less of a focus on testing and code maintainability.

They are also less likely to tinker with their toolset. I suspect this has much to do with the fact that Microsoft is the sole tool provider. Sure, you will get your rogue developer who will install resharper, but they are few and far between. And at the end of the day, it just sits on top of Visual Studio.

I also feel like the speed of innovation in the Microsoft world is somewhat slower because everyone has to wait for the Microsoft tools to evolve to support any new technology. There are occasionally attempts at open source solutions, but they generally get dumped once Microsoft supports the feature.

All that said, I don’t think you’d ever go hungry as a Microsoft developer, their focus on enterprise business ensures that they are always in demand at big companies.

Ruby on Rails – The rebels

As opposed to Microsoft who embraces the enterprise, Rails is much more interested in thumbing its nose at enterprise business and embraces startups instead.

I imagine this hurts rails when developers that try to make inroads into the large corporate marketplace, but it gives the culture the ability to experiment with new technologies. Mainly due to the fact that it’s not locked into having to work with every large legacy code bases.

The rebel nature of the rails community also causes it to question the given answers to a problem and come up with new creative solutions which fits perfectly with a startup culture. Not to mention the fact that rails is (for the most part) free, unlike Microsoft.NET which typically requires a Windows and SQL Server license. This has caused many a startup to favor rails.

Along with saving money, the open source nature of rails encourages folks in the community to roll their own solutions. This leads to quicker innovation because no one is waiting for a central authority to bless a technology. If you like, just install a gem and start using it.

Finally there seems to be more of a focus on quality and coding for the sheer joy of it. Something tells you me you’d never see a character like _why the lucky stiff in the .NET world…

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you can build great solutions with either technology and I’m not planning to "pull a gunderloy" anytime soon.

And neither culture is good or bad, per se, they are just radically different. So the next time you consider what solution to use, don’t forget about the culture that comes with it.