Outside, you might notice the woman hiking or skiing in Vermont's Green Mountain National Forest. But when she comes back indoors, Julia Lerman has a different persona. As an independent contractor and software developer, she's been programming for 20 years and self-employed for last 13. Somehow, she's found herself in a visible position in the .NET community, between user groups, Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), and other connections between software developers.

How did you find yourself here?

My path to .NET was a pretty natural one. It began with dBaseIII in 1985, and followed a mostly xBase route to Visual Basic in 1996—which of course led me head first into .NET. There were two times during those years when I forayed into a J-shaped world, but neither was for very long, due to my disappointment with the development tools.

I'm not quite sure of the “rock star” designation. I was feeling a little lonely when .NET came out, and I needed to find others to share the pain of the steep learning curve. That's how I ended up starting the Vermont.NET User Group. From there, I continued to reach out and meet more and more people in the .NET world through INETA, at conferences, and eventually through blogging. I suppose that, when you are not a shy person, you stand out a bit in a world of programmers (who are generally more on the quiet side).

I also love connecting people, when they have things in common or might be able to help one another. I love learning more about people than that they program in VB or a C#. This makes it really fun to introduce people, because they may both be into surfing. Last year, I was astonished to learn that two folks who are both thought of as C++ gurus had never met, so I just had to make sure they were introduced. It's really just fun for me. And it also just makes so much sense.

Through the blogs, I have gotten to feel as if I know a lot of people also, even if I have never even shared one E-mail with them. I love when people include stuff about their life outside of programming. When I meet these people face to face, I react to them like they are a long lost friend. I had a similar wonderful experience when meeting Robert Scoble's wife, Maryam. He writes so often about her in his blog that I felt like I knew her very well and really liked her! When we met at a party in Seattle, I just ran over to her and couldn't help giving her a huge hug and we were practically inseparable most of the evening. I think I did the same with Ingo Rammer when he came up to say Hi at TechEd last year. But heck, I've always been a sucker for an accent.

What does it mean to be an MVP? What do other people expect of MVPs? You've just spent a week at Microsoft's MVP gathering; what surprised you most about the people you met there?

The definition of MVP has been evolving, of late. There is an official definition on the Microsoft Web site, but it is not really quantifiable.

I think MVPs are part of a group of people who, just for the love of the technology, cannot help themselves when it comes to lending a hand with others; they love to share information. Such people have no expectations of anything in return - just the pleasure they derive from helping. So many people fit into this category! That's created some difficulties for Microsoft, as they attempt to identify these people and give them the MVP award. The MVP award is thanks for what you have done in the past year, and is granted for only one year at a time.

One of the things that I loved about the MVP summit was being mixed in with MVPs from many other technologies and I don't mean VB and C#. I mean XBox, Office, FrontPage, Windows—anyMicrosoft technology that has users. Developers tend to congregate and are used to being with other developers - for example, at conferences. So it was really fun to level the playing field. We were all there for the same reason, regardless of what technology we played out our roles in.

The thing that I think surprised me the most was the very young MVPs. I hope that in the near future there will be some teenage girl geeks among those young MVPs as well. Another thing that really impressed me was the great distances many people traveled to be there, which in some cases can be quite expensive.

What do you do that makes you feel really competent... that you know, while you're doing it, you're really good at it?

Washing dishes! There are generally very few surprises and I can almost always get them done in time and under budget. It's really quite satisfying.

But you probably were more interested in something along the lines of programming. Programming is definitely one of those fields that is defined by the phrase "the more you know, the less you know." I know I am pretty good at a lot of things: business analysis, architecting software, working with databases, coding in Visual Basic.

I also think that the disease of being a programmer is what sets a lot of programmers apart from the pack. I have that disease: being tenacious about solving a problem, to do something the best way you can. I often have to stop myself from overarchitecting applications, but usually make the excuse that it is the best learning tool, even if the particular app doesn't really require it. I often get yelled at by other developers for not charging my clients for the many extra hours I spend on their applications when I want to use the application as a playground to learn new things.

I've been working a lot lately with Tablet PCs. One of my consulting clients not only gets excited about new technology, but is savvy about how to leverage technology in his business. When he saw Tablet PCs, he immediately grokked the benefit of using them for a project that we were planning. So I got a tablet—and quickly realized how many design issues there were to consider.

I wrote about this in my weblog—a lot. I also wrote about the architecture of the application, since I had the freedom to try out a lot of new pieces of .NET in the design. This is why I love being a consultant. My clients trust me to make the right choices for them and are very comfortable with my playing out on the leading edge. For example, at this same client, I switched all development over to .NET in mid-2002. It's a wonderful feeling to have a client tell you that he brought the entire Chamber of Commerce to his business, so he can give them a tour of all the leading edge software I write for the company!

What was the last book you read, the last music you listened to?

Last book: Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver. Before that, Life of Pi. I read a lot of fiction at night to stop my brain from trying to solve programming problems so I can sleep. Last music: well, unfortunately, thanks to my client's phone system, it was Frank Sinatra. But prior to that, I think it was something by Tracey Chapman.

Most people specialize in one language, or one type of business solution, or one set of tools. You've stayed a generalist. Why?

I wonder if it is related to the fact that I am a die-hard Libra. We are known for our love of buffets as well as our channel surfing tendencies - a little bit of everything, and please don't make me choose!

Seriously, the nature of my work has a lot to do with this also. As an independent contractor, I have to solve a wide variety of problems, so I cannot really afford to focus on any one thing.

But then I think I have to return to the Libra argument. There are just so many interesting technologies out there, even within the scope of .NET. How could anyone not want to understand them all, even if that means not ever becoming an expert in any one area?

What about programming do you hate? What about the development process makes you think, at least for a moment, that perhaps this would be a good day to de-frag your hard disk instead?

I hate that our tools are a moving target and that we have to take many steps backward, in terms of our expertise, each time the tools evolve. But on the other hand (a classic Libra phrase) if our tools remained stagnant, then so would the software that we write.

What else do I dislike about programming? Having to work on legacy applications. Having to write collections without generics, or create login pages without ASP.NET 2.0. In other words, playing with the future tools sometimes makes the ones we still need to work with today seem suddenly old-hat, especially when the new tools will reduce massive amounts of coding for particular tasks that we still have to do today.

Why .NET, rather than some other technology family? What attracted you to .NET rather than (or following) the other development technologies you've used?

I think I mentioned earlier that I did play with some Java technologies. The first time was when Java was the hot new baby, and FoxPro had just moved to VFP3. I thought that, as long as I had a learning curve from FP26 to VFP3, why not just go to Java. I played with Sun's Java Workshop 1.0 for two months and gave up with that idea - the main reason was that there were no real database tools and I was (and am) essentially a database developer. But rather than return to FoxPro, I made the switch to Visual Basic. The second time was when I was again presented with a big learning curve, this time from VB6 to .NET. I played with JBuilder for 3 months and chose .NET. For me, this choice was a combination of my investment in VB, the awesome development tools, and what MSDN provides for me as a developer by way of information and easier access to my tools.

I was a little reluctant, at first, because I was pretty ticked off at Microsoft at the time. I did not yet see what .NET was all about. All I knew was that, at a time when I was really feeling that I was getting to the top of my game, Microsoft was ripping the rug out from under me and making me feel like a novice again. Also, at this time, Hailstorm was looking like a plot to take over the world. I really felt that I wanted to distance myself from Microsoft.

Now that I have worked with .NET for two years, I can't imagine using anything else as my main development platform.