When I see myself 12 years back, I was simply a .NET developer/ Web developer and nobody knows me in the world only few people I was working with and my family. I started working on SharePoint in 2001 and never know that one day more than 10000 people around the world know me respect me and care about me. It does not make sense but truly this because of SharePoint.
SharePoint and I have been flirting with each other for many years. I started out my professional career immediately after college as a Lotus Notes consultant and spent the next several years working primarily on Notes-related apps and sites. Here and there I would have an opportunity to branch out, and I got my toes wet in lots of other technologies including ASP and ASP.NET, some Java, PHP, etc. I almost got staffed on a SharePoint 1.0 project in 2003 and started learning a little bit about it, but nothing materialized… At any rate, just when I would start to get a little bit of experience in a new technology, I’d get laid off and have to go find another Notes job to pay the bills. (“Every time I try to get out, they keep dragging me back in!”)
In fact, I was hired into my current job as a short-term contractor to support the company’s Notes applications until they could be migrated to other platforms (SharePoint among them). When it became clear that the migration might take a little longer than they thought, and they realized they wanted to keep me on board permanently, my company offered me the chance to transition to SharePoint development whenever my Notes duties started winding down. Three years later, it’s finally happening – I now have 2 or 3 small SP development projects under my belt and several more in the works. (Which – uh oh – surely means I’m about to get laid off again? 😉
