Every choice you make impacts you today. What you learned in high school, college, and at your first few jobs all shape who you are and what you know. If I wouldn't have spent those years in ASP.NET. I know programming, have the same skill set as you pretty much (no Python). I would have loved to be increasing my Ruby/JS skills during the "lost years" doing ASP.NET.
Sorry you feel that you "lost years" doing ASP.NET. I did some COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, C, C++, VB, and Delphi during a period of two to four years and don't feel they were "lost years". In fact it was all fun. Would I be better off if I had done something different? I guess I will never know...
They were lost in that nothing I did with ASP.NET (not MVC) has translated to what I'm doing today. No patterns, no habits, no tooling, nothing. COBOL/FORTRAN are languages and I'm not sure they correlate here - but maybe top-down design ripples still? :):). I learned a lot in Pascal - mostly how to comment things :)
Well, I'm ok with having wasted some of my years in technology that has nothing to do with what I want to do today. I read your blog, watched some of your Tekpub productions, downloaded and used some of your code (massive) in a project, and have been following you on the Internet for quite a while. Honestly, for someone that lost ten years of his life you are doing fine. I downloaded biggy today and will be checking it out -- thanks for your contributions.
