Keyvan Nayyeri

This is something that I could write in the past 1.5 years since we finalized our work on Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 for Wrox. It’s almost five years that I’ve been actively contributing to the .NET community started as a very normal developer to where I am today. And today I’m resigning from the .NET community as an active contributor to focus more on my new concerns and save my time for things that do matter more to me at the present.

This means that you no more can expect me to act as a veteran for this community publishing books, writing articles, posting frequent blog entries, and giving talks on .NET topics. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I’m abandoning everything, and I have my blog here with a primary focus on more advanced topics and may publish some stuff about .NET from time to time, but I try to focus on some topics that can form the future not the present.

I’m not a person to leave out question marks for my audience and you can notice that in all my publications; therefore, in the rest of this post I’m going to talk more about this decision by giving a report of what I did for the .NET community in the past few years, and explaining my reasons for resigning from it.

What I Did

I started contributing to the .NET community in 2002 with my technical blogs in Persian where I published content about .NET development for almost 2.5 years and wrote or translated some articles for prominent Persian communities at that time.

In June 2005 I started a new adventure targeting an international audience because I had the feeling that I have something to share at this level. Here is a brief report of what I did in the past 5 years:

• I wrote 4 books for Wiley/Wrox including Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (author), Professional Visual Studio Extensibility (author), Professional Visual Studio 2008 (guest-author and technical editor), and Professional Community Server (co-author). Putting the last year aside, I had a rate of one book per year published.
• I published 29 articles, whitepapers, and reviews for Microsoft EMEA, ASP Alliance, DotNetSlackers, CodeProject, and other communities.
• I coordinated and contributed to 14 Open Source projects related to .NET.
• I published over 1000 blog posts including over 750 tutorials, articles, and tips/tricks about .NET development that mostly served as one of the primary sources in their area and aggregated and republished by other sites.
• I received some awards and recognitions including Microsoft Visual Studio Extensibility Insider, Telligent Community Server MVP, DZone MVB, Community Credit Hall of Fame, and Community Credit Grand Prize Winner.
• Being on Twitter since very first days of its existence, I’ve had over 7000 tweets and I think that at least half of them were technical tweets about .NET.
• Despite spending most of this time in Iran without any active local community, I gave a few talks on .NET as well.

Since early 2006 I was always 1-2 years ahead of the mainstream topics of the community working on early versions of Microsoft products and promoting them using my publications. I especially had active publications to promote WPF, WCF, WF, and ASP.NET MVC when they were in early stages of development.

I have to note that some of these achievements were in the era that I was serving my mandatory military service for 20 months and had to spend over 12 hours a day and return back to home exhausted and angry.

Tough Decision

The below-mentioned reasons drove me to make my mind after arguing with myself for a long time. It’s not easy to ignore five years of hard work and all the achievements that I outlined above, but from a standpoint life is a set of decisions and success comes from making the right decision at the right time.

In order for me to be able to make such a decision I had to consult people to ask for their opinions and comments. Industrial people had the idea that my rich resume can help me get higher job positions in the future, so I have to keep my work on the community. On the other hand, academic people had the idea that I have to focus more on what I do at academia and try to get the best out of it. As Dr. Shonle told me the other day, there are two groups of people getting a Doctorate degree: people who get a Ph.D. to use it in their titles and email signatures only, and those who get a Ph.D. and really know something about it. Obviously, I didn’t enter the graduate school to spend five years of my life for the former one!

I have four major reasons for this decision: time, interest, energy, and motivation each of which is described in the next few sections.

Time

The time is definitely the most challenging part of my life (like many other people). After all these years, I’ve learned time management very well, but I never can learn how to expand the time to have 48 hours in a day! I have limited time for my tasks and this compels me to make selections for tasks that have a higher priority.

Studying at Ph.D. level is a very challenging experience and it has been for me in the past few months. After passing my first semester successfully and experiencing all the difficulties, I’ve started my serious research work and realized that it’s hard to keep myself busy with multiple tasks. It’s a matter of a fact that context switch is a pure overhead in any context and it is also the case in real life. I found it very exhausting to keep myself up with several tasks including my own courses, the course that I have to teach, the research project, and all the other jobs.

Besides, I need to leave enough time for myself to relax and keep myself ready for the work. At some points I noticed that I’m giving up my relaxing time for all these side-tasks. This is one of the bad habits that I had in years (to do computer-related work in my free times for fun) and I’ve decided to stop this. After all, I’m a human and I spend a lot of time in front of computers, and don’t want to hurt myself with anything redundant.

Therefore, one of the early things to drop from my schedule is anything related to .NET that is not something that I use on a daily basis for my job anymore. I think the time is the main factor for me to make this decision. Of course, if I had the feeling that this is beneficial, I might somehow keep myself up with .NET, but as I’ll say later, the interest, energy, and motivation are also other problems.

Interest

Let’s face it. I’m 25 years old and have started my graduate studies that can change my direction in life. I’m not getting a Ph.D. to go back to where I was before and write code to get some user input, process them, and provide the output back because if I do, I’m an idiot to waste all these years for a degree. My world is different from many other .NET community leaders who are now older than 30 and have fixed their path in life.

There is a correlation between what you do and your interests. At some point I was developing regular software systems, so .NET was something very appealing to me, but now I’m doing my research on compiler design and .NET has almost nothing to do with what I need. As a direct consequence, I wouldn’t have such a burning passion for .NET anymore.

No one can gainsay the fact that he has had different interests as he became older. A few weeks ago Granville Barnett resigned from the Microsoft MVP program and when I asked him about the reason, he said that his interests are changed over the time. Interestingly, he’s also a Ph.D. student!

One requirement for me as a Ph.D. student is to have an open mind looking at technical phenomena from a higher perspective without any biased view, and being a part of the .NET community may not let me do that even though I used to criticize many things about Microsoft and .NET in the past.

Energy

Even if I had time and interest, I no more have energy to appear on the .NET community frequently. I consume much energy everyday for my primary tasks that doesn’t leave much space for any side-activities.

Last week was a nightmare for me as I had to prepare my session for Austin Code Camp 2010 and didn’t have any time and energy left for that. At Code Camp all I could do was to attend a session, have my talk, and drive back home to rest for a while even though I had planned to stay there to the end and spend the evening with some friends in Austin. This is just an example of several times when I had such problems!

Motivation

Nothing can be done without a good motivation. For years I had the motivation to share my knowledge with others even though I knew that there isn’t much coming back to me. These activities didn’t benefit me at all even my books!

For a long time I didn’t say this publicly but it’s something clear that I never got what I deserved to get on the Microsoft community. If you go back and forth and quickly review what I did in the past years, and compare them to many other people with less activities on the community, you’ll be surprised why I didn’t get what I deserved to get.

I think that the least expectation that someone like me could have was to receive enough respect from the community that I’m spending my time for. It was really insulting for me to see Microsoft nominating me for an MVP award in January 2010 but don’t consider me as qualified! I think that I was overqualified for this award since late 2007 and what this meant to me was nothing but the fact that my time is not appreciated by this community. I didn’t, don’t, and won’t need this award at all. I never did anything to get such awards because it could be a silly thing for me. It’s my skills and my expertise that makes my future, but it was very disappointing to see them acting like that! I’m not very surprised because if Microsoft had treated its human resources and talents in a good way, we were not at such a poor point!

Temporary or Permanently?

The question is whether this is temporary or permanently and I really don’t know the answer, but I can tell you that there is a low chance that I come back to the old style even if I return to the Microsoft community. I need to free up my time as much as possible to be able to concentrate on my graduate studies and research.

I may attend .NET community events and follow the news and updates but don’t expect me to be a content provider. I believe that it’s the point that I’m making with this announcement that others can’t expect me to contribute anymore!

As of this blog, I don’t have any plan to stop it, but there will be upcoming changes in the content as I will publish content on various topics ranging from Programming Languages and Compilers to Software Engineering as well as some programming posts that primarily focus on something that have a high influence. I will publish content about Java, Scala, Ruby, and .NET based on the circumstance.

Bottom Line

It was a great adventure for me being on the .NET community in the past five years and more than anything else, my primary achievements were nothing but learning new things and finding great friends. I’d like to thank you all for making this adventure possible. Everything has an end and that’s the nature of our world. I don’t like to abandon my friendship with many great friends that I found on this community, so I try to use Twitter and other tools to stay in touch with them.