In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of matter hypothesized to account for a large part of the mass of the universe, but which neither emits nor scatters light or other electromagnetic radiation, and so cannot be directly seen with telescopes. – Wikipedia on Dark Matter

You can’t see dark matter, but we’re pretty sure it’s there. Not only is it there, but it’s MOST of what’s there. We know it and we can’t see it. It never shows up.

My coworker Damian Edwards and I hypothesize that there is another kind of developer than the ones we meet all the time. We call them Dark Matter Developers. They don’t read a lot of blogs, they never write blogs, they don’t go to user groups, they don’t tweet or facebook, and you don’t often see them at large conferences. Where are these dark matter developers online?

Part of this is the web’s fault. The web insists on moving things forward at an rate that makes people feel unable to keep up. I mean, Google Chrome has upped two version numbers just in the last 3 paragraphs of this blog post. Microsoft probably created a new API and deprecated an old one just while I was typing this sentence.

Lots of technologies don’t iterate at this speed, nor should they. Embedded developers are still doing their thing in C and C++. Both are deeply mature and well understood languages that don’t require a lot of churn or panic on the social networks.

Where are the dark matter developers? Probably getting work done. Maybe using ASP.NET 1.1 at a local municipality or small office. Maybe working at a bottling plant in Mexico in VB6. Perhaps they are writing PHP calendar applications at a large chip manufacturer.*

Personally, as one of the loud-online-pushing-things-forward 1%, I might think I need to find these Dark Matter Developers and explain to them how they need to get online! Join the community! Get a blog, start changing stuff, mix it up! But, as my friend Brad Wilson points out, those dark matter 99% have a lot to teach us about GETTING STUFF DONE.

They use mature products that are well-known, well-tested and well-understood. They aren’t chasing the latest beta or pushing any limits, they are just producing. (Or they are just totally chilling and punching out at 5:01pm, but I like to think they are producing.) Point is, we need to find a balance between those of us