As many of you will be aware, I'm currently spending my spare time attempting to write chapters for the next edition of Beginning ASP.NET. It's not an easy task - my current job means I'm away from home a couple of nights a week, and I'm so busy that I barely have time to sort out the washing at the end of the week, let alone write chapters for a book!
The thing that's bothering me (and hence why I'm inflicting this on you lot) is that, in my current position, I feel further away from the target audience on this book than on any other book I've ever worked on. I worry that I'm in danger of losing touch with the audience, and that I could be in danger of assuming too much these days.
The wierdest thing of all occurred to me in a book shop the other day. James and I were browsing through the programming books, and it suddenly occurred to us that we don't see ourselves as professional programmers, yet that was the magic audience that, while we were at Wrox, we strived to reach with the books we produced. We both saw ourselves as developers - and we're not even sure about the "professional" part - we're just doing our jobs, and though society views people like us (university level-educated office dwellers) as "professionals", I'm not sure that description can really be applied the way they might like it to be... In the words of Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
There are different levels of developers in the UK job scene, with job titles ranging from junior developer to application developer, systems developer, senior developer, architect developer, etc. but never programmers... Programmers, to me, are your old-school coders who deal with legacy systems (4GL, perhaps?), whereas developers will sit on the "slightly out of date to current to leading edge of technology" (so, from my Microsoft-centric view, VB6 to .NET 2 betas).
I come back to the "Programmer to Programmer" tag line at the top of each Wrox book I worked on and I look at myself now - surely the target audience for a good old-fashioned Wrox Professional book if ever I saw one, and I just see a developer doing a job, striving to do it well, competently, and using as many "best practices" as I can... but not really a programmer.
A final note - with the drag 'n drop revolution of ASP.NET 2 almost upon us (70% less code, so they claim) are we moving away from development as a profession? Sure, that's way down the line, we're in no danger yet, but I can't help but wonder what shape the world will be in 5-10 years, and how people like me will fit in.