I got a fascinating email from Ian Griffiths this morning. It's always fun for me to read email from people that are considerably smarter than I. Even if the bulk of the email is indecypherable, I can still usually pick up a tidbit somewhere toward the end.

In this case it was actually a bit of an aside from him, but I thought it had a lot of insight on the technical community and their technology perspectives. With Ian's permission, I decided to summarize it, and then expand on it a bit. There were three interesting thoughts that emerged:

1) Technical people are prone to view the world as centered upon their particular technology, with the balance of the industry being a mere detail.

For example, many DBAs would tell you that the entire software industry is about capturing and storing data. What you do with it is largely irrelevant.

Likewise, a UX person would tell you that the display is what matters, since that is all the users see. Just get them the data, so they can do the important part.

Or the plumbing guys, who would say that anyone can store data and draw pictures. The real meat is in connecting stuff. These are the folks that actually read the ws-* specs.

Perhaps this is natural; yet it reveals an actionable point of growth for technical professionals. Many of us have been taught to see alternative views in life. I think it is beneficial in technical circles as well, and I believe it is under-practiced. Not everyone operates from the same perspective, and if we discredit the person who sees value along a different axis, we cheat ourselves.

2) What draws people to certain technologies? At some point, most of us have looked at .NET 3.0. What draws one person to WorkFlow, and the other person to WPF? I know there are stereotypes, and perhaps there is merit in some corners of them. But why is it that someone is pulled toward a specific technology area? Ian said "I find the point at which humans meet the computer systems we build endlessly fascinating". I have to agree. Although I admit I don't have the answer (opinions welcome here), something seems to draw people down certain paths. Is it personality? Is someone out there clever enough to map personality traits to technology affinities?

3) Industry focus drifts through the technology spectrum, nudged along by both innovations and (unfortunately) marketing hype. Terms like SOA and DNA burn brightly in their initial window of visibility, and then are relegated to last month's featured flavor, as the next buzzword captures headlines. Often, a technology solidifies long after the hype has passed. The upshot of this is that value and hype are often orthogonal for a given moment in time. It's not that they can't be related. It just that they usually are out of sync. Gartner does a nice job expounding on the five phases of a hype cycle, and it does show a delayed relationship between magazine hype and adoption. I won't expound further on it, as they do a better job with it than I would.

Anyway, it was just something that caught my eye, like most shiny objects and fast food establishments.