One of my friends was recently musing on whether they should attend DevLink or not and, in their musings, said it all depended upon what the SQL Tracks were going to be. For some reason, that particular incident reminded me of the parable of the Beam:

Judge not, that ye be not judged.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
Matthew 7:1-5

Regardless of the original intent of the parable, I think it's very applicable to developers (myself included) when it comes to technology in general and programming languages in specific.

I would say that most developers who have been around for more than a couple of years have been forced to learn a new technology, even if it's only the new version of their current technology. And most of us are very good at some part of that technology. I can list a lot of developers who really rock at SQL Server or C# or VB(.NET) or, well, you get the idea. But that very focus can have a detrimental effect on us as developers if we reach a point where we filter everything through that technology, an effect that seems to manifest itself in two different ways.

The first is the "My technology is the greatest thing in the world and it's a true panacea." SQL Server is great, but I really wouldn't want to write a T-SQL stored procedure to handle a large amount of string processing, because that's something SQL Server does neither well nor efficiently. And yet I have known a developer or two whose answer to everything is, "We can do that in the database." Not many but still...

The second, and far more insidious effect is that of putting blinders on that filter out anything not related to our chosen technology. When .NET first came out and C# was introduced, there were a lot of VB programmers that took the "They can have my VB when they pry it out of my cold, dead hands" stance, some of whom even refused to look at the code. The real shame of putting on blinders that limit our technology focus to our chosen technology is that it artificially eliminates items that may not be totally relevant to our job but have an impact on how we do our work.

There have been times that attending sessions or reading about a technology totally unrelated to mine has made me rethink some of the ways I'm handling things in my day to day technology. Sometimes those have been directly beneficial. Sometimes they have not worked but led me down a path that was. And sometimes it ended up being just an interesting intellectual exercise following along. But in each of those cases, I was sharpening my saw, which is always a good thing.