I've been in IT in Rhode Island for many years, as employee, manager and independent consultant, doing business as the latter full-time as D Smith Systems since 1988.

Started out doing IBM 370 assembler in the seventies, moving to database design and applications, on through CICS, Unix, Windows of all generations, and now focussing on .Net and Web applications.

Very interested by the collaborative aspects of this community, remembering the days when I thought I must be the only C programmer in Rhode Island and needed help (remember bbs's and sig's? and 300-baud modems?).

Another phenomenon that strikes me is the growing number of specialties (look at the tags, for example) emerging from what were once self-standing (and primitive) technologies, like from ARPANET to Web 2.0 and from html coding to full IDE's. Or from C language hacking to .Net. It's interesting to see how each area's evolving best practices retain core commonalities and then their own branch-off characteristics.

So I'll be snooping around the blogs, maybe throwing in two cents' worth once in a while. Info technology is truly a geek's dream, and the pace of change is still picking up.