Like most programmers, I have a shortlist of developers that I keep high up on a pedestal. These are developers, or former developers who have been around the block a time or two, and have established a reputation in the development community for their skills and expertise. I remember back in '95, when I was just learning VB, meeting a developer who ran a well known software component company. Even back then he was a legend in the VB community. His book was, and still is, the reference book for VB developers using the Win32 APIs. Yes I am speaking about Dan Appleman of Desaware.
Over the last 11 years I have honed my skills to the point, and began giving back to the community enough, to be recognized as an MVP in the ASP.Net community. But I still have many in the community that I respect and continue to look up to as my "idols". These are the developers who inspire me to read just one more book or to give PowerShell one more try (while providing financial planning, hacking the XBOX360, mastering every cool utility on the market, leading an Open Source project and doing it all in Swahili - or is that Ndebele? I get confused between the two really easily). The reason I say all this is because I was reading Dan's last blog entry and noticed a reference to DotNetNuke near the bottom of the posting.
I continue to be amazed every day by how far DotNetNuke has come since the early IBuySpyWorkshop days. It seems every day I find some new nugget of information that blows my socks off about how big this has really become: I see posts like this one talking about the Australian Department of Defense running their materiel acquisition program on a DNN intranet app, or a recent email by a Fortune 100 company asking about any export restrictions since they are building an application based on DotNetNuke that will be sold globally, or even a site in our showcase from the New York Stock Exchange.
The fact that DotNetNuke has come so far in the last three years is a true testament to the outstanding leadership of Shaun Walker. To the amazing contributions of the core team and the project teams. And to the continued support of all the people in this amazing community who continue to give us some gentle and some not so gentle nudges to keep improving DotNetNuke. We may not always succeed in meeting everyone's expectations of the product or our support thereof, but we have always managed to keep plugging away hoping to do just a little better today than we did yesterday. Who knows. Maybe a couple years from now I'll be reading Ray Ozzie's blog and get my eyes opened even wider.