I've been using microsoft dev stack for as long as i remember. Since I picked up C#/.NET in 2002 I haven't looked back. I got spoiled by things like type safety, generics, LINQ and its functional twist on C#, await/async, and Visual Studio, the best IDE one could ask for.

Over the past few years though, I've seen the rise of many competing open source stacks that get many things right, e.g. command line tooling, package management, CI, CD, containerization, and Linux friendliness. In general many of those frameworks are more Mac friendly than Windows. Microsoft started sobering up to this fact and started open sourcing its frameworks and tools, and generally being more Mac/Linux friendly, but I think that, first, it's a bit too late, and second, it's not mature yet; not even comparable to what you get on VS + Windows.

More recently I switched jobs and I'm mainly using Mac, Python, and some Java. I've also used node in a couple of small projects. My feeling: even though I may be resisting change, I genuinely feel that C# is a better designed language than Java, and I feel that static type languages are far superior to dynamic ones, especially on large projects with large number of developers. I get that dynamic languages gives you a productivity boost, and they make you feel liberated, but most of the time I feel that this productivity is lost when you have to compensate for type safety with more unit tests that would not be necessary in a static type language, also you tend to get subtle bugs that are only manifested at runtime.

So I'm really torn: enjoy world class development platform and language, but sacrifice large ecosystem of open source tools and practices that get the devops culture; or be content with less polished frameworks/languages but much larger community that gets how apps should be built, deployed, monitored, etc.

Damn you Microsoft for coming late to the open source party.

Roughly one year ago we'd been setting up our network to have our IP whitelisted.

The process took way more than it should've. Here's why:

* Back story: *
Coworker had been talking to IT because he wanted his PC && a devkit to have static IPs.

IT did that && set up the network so that in the future they wouldn't have to be bothered about it.
They set aside a pool of IPs 10.0.2.50-10.0.2.100.

/* You _know_ where this is going, right? */

Coworker: We have our static IPs. This is our range: 10.0.2.50-10.0.2.100. Could you pass it over to $company_name so that we have our IPs whitelisted?
Boss: Finally! Yes, will do.
* Passes the info over. *
* Week passes. *
C: Do we have our IPs whitelisted?
B: Got the info that they should be.
C: Damn, it doesn't work!
* B starts blaming $company_name 's support. *
* Another week passes. *
C: Any word on the whitelisted IPs?
B: They tell me it's set up. Can you try now?
C: Nope, still doesn't work.
* B starts bitching about IT how they're incompetent. How they were supposed to be pros && all that. *

/* I got wind of the whole situation. */

Me: Hold on. Those aren't the IP we need to pass to the $company_name.

* Provide the _correct_ Internet-facing IP. *
* Gets whitelisted within 1-2 days. *

These are the people I'm dealing w/ right now. They'll bitch about everyone being incompetent, but when it turns out _they_ have been at fault I hear no responsibility being taken.

/* I'm also reminded of this adage: Garbage In, Garbage Out. So true. */