Don Box blogged about getting together with Martin Gudgin and Ted Pattison recently. In the post, he talks about the changed landscape in the training arena - how training has become commoditized, platform vendors are driving information and what he calls the 'Google Effect' (questions can be answered by a simple query).
I was working with Regulator last night using the “search” function to grab regular expressions other people have built. This started me thinking about how tools are changing the development landscape. There was a time when this type of knowledge and expertise would have been relegated to a small set of developers/contractors who acted kind of like 'Cleaners'. (If you've seen the movie La Femme Nikita or the Bridget Fonda remake, you'll know the reference complete with personality type.) Sometimes the incremental advances we see in tools allow us to take these jumps for granted, and the type of integration in products like Regulator is logical but not trivial.
I think great teachers are a rarity and Box, Gudgin and Pattison all fall into that category. I've had the opportunity, as many of us have, to sit through presentations by all 3 and I went to a training session by Gudgin back in '99. I've wondered why Box and Gudgin left the training arena, and his blog shed some new light on that area. I hope he blogs more of those insights in the future. I'm sure being able to drive not only .NET but also the SOAP services was pretty compelling as well. A friend of mine once said the goal of every developer is to develop code that is actively running and driving applications that are being widely used. That said, there aren't many positions available with the type of impact and fulfillment that Box and Gudgin are filling. Besides, it has to beat trying to repeatedly teach other peoples concepts and implementations. But that's just me guessing.
It seems to me the development community is starting to become more dynamic than it ever has before. Perhaps blogging and wikis are an essential part of that growth. (?)