Well, as my profile indicates and some old geezers still around here might remember from past forum years, I am living in The Netherlands. And no, that is not the capital of Amsterdam.....
I have heard developers say they are that busy that they have to turn down work. Well, over here in Europe, more specifically in The Netherlands and the European Mainland, there is absolutely no offer of programming work for Alpha developers whatever. None. There are only a handful of Alpha Five programmers living in the Netherlands, and hack, I know the most of them personally and even can say I trained and coached the best of them. Only to experience, that they in the end switched over to some .NET environment working with C# and NHibernate, Spring.NET and ASP.NET. Because that is what the business market in the end demands.
Over here, the business market will turn away from you if you say you develop in Alpha Five. It is not the de facto market standard over here, stronger yet, nobody professional has ever heard about it. When you say: "Hey, did you ever think about designing it in Alpha Five?" they will say: "Alpha Five? What is that?".
Well, lets start of with saying you don't need to turn ME around! I already know what Alpha's products are capable of, and already made the most fabulous things with it that were the oil in the machinery of institutions with 100+ users working with it. It can do anything any .NET product can do, but it does it simpler and way, way faster! Yeah, even if you throw NHibernate in the equation. But what I think is not the point. I am only one individual. What the market thinks is important. And the market over here rejects Alpha Five as a professional programming market. It is still considered to be a "B-line" Microsoft Access type of consumer-do-it-yourself-for-your-stamp-collection-kind-of-product. And that is not going to change anytime soon, since companies over here have invested big time in .NET solutions, and systems more and more need to be interconnected.
I have met a few quite impressive developers over the years who worked with Alpha in The Netherlands. One of them for instance Marcel Kollenaar. He was a wizard of its own class working with connections to Word, RS232, etc etc. As far as I know, he stopped working with Alpha due to the fact business had no interest for it here. I have personally appointed the very talented Chris Dickey who you might remember from a presentation he gave once on an Alpha Conference in Boston. I got him that far to come over to The Netherlands, live here and work with me. He did great, but in the end also saw his future outside of Alpha. And there are more. One might remember Brendo Bongers from this forum. A very smart and gifted developer that I personally introduced to Alpha Five. His Alpha solutions in the end of his time with Alpha would blow almost anything in existence out of the water. But he also left Alpha for a future with .NET and I am sure he will soon outperform his colleagues there as well. Point is, whatever you do, you can't manage on your own. It is impossible for any individual to make a breakthrough for Alpha Five on Europe's mainland. It needs vast investments and efforts to get there, and you are not going to achieve that on your own. And since you can't (as I have experienced) and Alpha does not show any interest in investing over here as well.....
As an Alpha programmer, that somewhat leaves you in the dark here, to say the least. You don't get any work which blocks any professional spread of the product in Europe.
Furthermore, the last appointed distributor in the Netherlands has never been active, and has stopped doing anything about it for years ago already. I do not even know if they still do anything with Alpha or even still exist for that matter. There is no official representation from Alpha in Europe's mainland. Only in the UK as I understand, but I do not know how that works out.
So there you are. No work here. As it seems, much work in the USA. So what do we do about it?
Are there any Alpha developers residing on the European mainland that actually CAN live professionally from developing in Alpha Five? If yes, what's your story?
If you are an American based developer, how is your market and professional portfolio? Do you get enough work in?
I have heard developers say they are that busy that they have to turn down work. Well, over here in Europe, more specifically in The Netherlands and the European Mainland, there is absolutely no offer of programming work for Alpha developers whatever. None. There are only a handful of Alpha Five programmers living in the Netherlands, and hack, I know the most of them personally and even can say I trained and coached the best of them. Only to experience, that they in the end switched over to some .NET environment working with C# and NHibernate, Spring.NET and ASP.NET. Because that is what the business market in the end demands.
Over here, the business market will turn away from you if you say you develop in Alpha Five. It is not the de facto market standard over here, stronger yet, nobody professional has ever heard about it. When you say: "Hey, did you ever think about designing it in Alpha Five?" they will say: "Alpha Five? What is that?".
Well, lets start of with saying you don't need to turn ME around! I already know what Alpha's products are capable of, and already made the most fabulous things with it that were the oil in the machinery of institutions with 100+ users working with it. It can do anything any .NET product can do, but it does it simpler and way, way faster! Yeah, even if you throw NHibernate in the equation. But what I think is not the point. I am only one individual. What the market thinks is important. And the market over here rejects Alpha Five as a professional programming market. It is still considered to be a "B-line" Microsoft Access type of consumer-do-it-yourself-for-your-stamp-collection-kind-of-product. And that is not going to change anytime soon, since companies over here have invested big time in .NET solutions, and systems more and more need to be interconnected.
I have met a few quite impressive developers over the years who worked with Alpha in The Netherlands. One of them for instance Marcel Kollenaar. He was a wizard of its own class working with connections to Word, RS232, etc etc. As far as I know, he stopped working with Alpha due to the fact business had no interest for it here. I have personally appointed the very talented Chris Dickey who you might remember from a presentation he gave once on an Alpha Conference in Boston. I got him that far to come over to The Netherlands, live here and work with me. He did great, but in the end also saw his future outside of Alpha. And there are more. One might remember Brendo Bongers from this forum. A very smart and gifted developer that I personally introduced to Alpha Five. His Alpha solutions in the end of his time with Alpha would blow almost anything in existence out of the water. But he also left Alpha for a future with .NET and I am sure he will soon outperform his colleagues there as well. Point is, whatever you do, you can't manage on your own. It is impossible for any individual to make a breakthrough for Alpha Five on Europe's mainland. It needs vast investments and efforts to get there, and you are not going to achieve that on your own. And since you can't (as I have experienced) and Alpha does not show any interest in investing over here as well.....
As an Alpha programmer, that somewhat leaves you in the dark here, to say the least. You don't get any work which blocks any professional spread of the product in Europe.
Furthermore, the last appointed distributor in the Netherlands has never been active, and has stopped doing anything about it for years ago already. I do not even know if they still do anything with Alpha or even still exist for that matter. There is no official representation from Alpha in Europe's mainland. Only in the UK as I understand, but I do not know how that works out.
So there you are. No work here. As it seems, much work in the USA. So what do we do about it?
Are there any Alpha developers residing on the European mainland that actually CAN live professionally from developing in Alpha Five? If yes, what's your story?
If you are an American based developer, how is your market and professional portfolio? Do you get enough work in?
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