Let’s get core skills out of the way; you need some exposure to the MVC, asp.net code-behind model only just doesn’t cut it. You should understand the rendering pipeline, how to manipulate the HTTP request and so forth. Basic stuff.

You should also know Serialization inside and out. That’s pretty core to how everything works these days. Ideally you should know Castle Windsor or Spring.NET or some other IoC container framework.

You should have at least some exposure to a completely different stack, e.g. .NET developers who’ve used PHP also will have a leg up over someone who’s been stuck in ASP.NET all their lives.

Next up you need to understand how HTML is rendered and processed on the browser. You need to understand the browser and how to work with it and how to write cross-browser compliant code.

Performance cuts across all this. You need to understand asynchronous web services, how to minimize your page size, how to optimize when data is loaded, how to instantiate DOM objects appropriately (as needed) and how to cleanup after yourself.

Know a JS library; If you haven’t used JQuery, Prototype, ExtJS, Backbase, Dojo, MooTools or something similar I’m sorry. You lose. If you’ve built a JQuery Extension, you win.

Testing; Have you used nMock, nUnit, mbUnit, SoapUI, Selenium, WatiN? Why not?

A good all round web developer will have some exposure to image manipulation and CSS. Maybe not photoshop but something similar. Maybe their stuff won’t be pretty but at least they should be able to create basic images, slice and dice a PNG, make a Sprite etc. Did you know you can base64 encode images and embed them in a CSS file?

BY now you should’ve used or played with a wide range of the open APIs out there, anything from the programmableweb.com basically. Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, and so on. You might even have used some of the cloud APIs out there, things like EC2, Azure, S3, Google App Engine. Recreational use outside of your core job still counts!

Want to really set yourself apart? Know security and identity federation. You should know and have implemented oAuth, OpenID, SAML, Ws-Federation, FBConnect, Google Friend Connect.

Lastly you should have your own site(s) portfolio to point at. This is just good business if you’re a freelancer but I think more folks need to demonstrate what they can do before hiring in this manner.

Sound like you? Shoot me an email and maybe we can work something out.

On to some jilted lover madness:

A Belgian woman (skydiver) sabotaged her friend’s parachute after discovering her boyfriend (also a skydiver) was engaged in an affair with the friend. All three dove out of a plane for their final dive together. Sure enough the lady’s parachute failed and she dropped 13,000 feet to her death. What’s worse is the entire dive was captured on the victims’ helmet camera. [LINK]

Here’s another one:
"A NASA astronaut, Marie Nowak drove all night from Houston to Orlando wearing diapers so she would not have to stop, to kidnap her rival for the affections of another Astronaut. She was caught wearing a trench coat and wig and had a knife, BB pistol, rubber tubing and plastic bag." [LINK] If I had a nickel for every time I’ve done that.

And finally something useful – Dark Room [LINK] – "Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment".  It’s just a notepad but it fills your entire screen and hence removes all other distractions from your PC.

Since 9/11 and the decline of the economy, it became clear to me that I needed to do more than say “hey I’m an architect” and draw rectangles on a whiteboard to be relevant in today’s IT industry.

People like that are easily culled in the down-time and easily replaced.

5 years later, it dawned on me in a very Stuart Smalley way that “Gosh-darned it, I’m important!”. Not in a self-serving sense but in terms of the type of developer I represent.

Here’s concrete examples why:

a) I’m important to Adobe/Macromedia who are gearing up for a bloodbath between Flex and Microsoft’s Vista/Sparkle/Longhorn. Adobe likes people like me as they need developers/architects who are going to take their software, develop something with it, create a small-grassroots buzz and gain mindshare for their products.I’m typing this as I’m downloading 130MB of Flex builder Beta.

b) Amazon likes me as I leverage their Web services platform and have built a lot of stuff that again, helped them gain mindshare.
c) Microsoft likes me as I’m the type of person they’re going after for things like Mix’06 and so on.

d) Microsoft also likes me as they want to push things like Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation forward. I’m the kind of guy that’ll do that and bring them into major organizations day-to-day.

In the last year I’ve been in print (Business Week, Puget Sound journal, Visual Studio Developer Magazine), asked to speak at conferences (Interop 2005) and have been engaged by a leading publisher to write a book which may or may not happen.

So what’s more Web2.0 than me? I’m grass-roots. I’m trading sleep for xml, RSS for ZZZ. I’m bleeding edge and darn it people like me.

Lastly, who benefits most? My employer of course. They gain an employee who is constantly learning, experimenting and can speak with confidence on a set of topics not because I’ve read about them or attended a vendor demo but because I’ve used them first-hand.

Some new pics of The Syd now that the weather’s warming up. Enjoy.