October 5, 2007

ALT.NET Opening Session - This is gonna be good...

by Brian Donahue

So, we're most of the way through the opening session. We started off with a general welcome and individual introductions. Scott HanselmanBroken Link: http://hansleman.com/ stole the show with his intro, in which he said he was happy to be here at the "Not Invented Here Conference" and later dubbed it the "'I hate ViewState conference.'" We then had an intro to Open Space conferencing, and a "Fish Bowl" example.


For those who don't know, a Fish Bowl is basically a panel conversation where you have, say, 6 chairs, one of which is always empty. Only people sitting in the chairs can talk, but anyone can get up and sit in the empty chair to join the discussion and one of the existing participants must sit down. It was interesting because it really was a microcosm of all the reasons people are here, to name a few:

• Finding better ways to create software


• Learn more about Agile, TDD, BDD, Monorail, Mono... the list goes on


• Building a community


• Selling/proliferating agile and XP principles


• Spreading developer passion in the .NET space

Again, Scott Hanselman made some waves here by challenging the attendees to point out what is it they don't like about Microsoft. I thought he came off as a little too defensive and/or confrontational - but I understand where he's coming from. He was kind of trying to make it sound like we are here because we hate "ViewState" or "the designer" or "Mort." I think that is way over-simplifying it. Dave Laribee countered some of his points by basically saying he wanted to be able to write software the way he felt was right, not necessarily the way Microsoft says to do so. I think that one thing that was glaringly missing from the argument was the sense of community (of course this has become my pet cause). Ruby and Java developers have passion for their technologies because they feel they have a personal investment in it. When they are in pain, they have a community to turn to that (usually!) graciously offers help, advice, or even code/tools to ease their pain. That isn't how it feels in .NET. In .NET, I think many people feel like they have to wait for Microsoft to release the next version of whatever it is, and hopefully that will address their pain. The biggest barrier to being passionate about what you are doing is the feeling that you are powerless to change things.


I think everyone here is passionate about making some changes in the way they create software, and I look forward to hearing all the ideas.


UPDATE: So far all my geek dreams are coming true. ScottGuBroken Link: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/ is scheduled to give us all a preview of the Microsoft MVC framework, which I've heard mostly good things about, and am very curious. I've met a lot of cool people, including finally meeting JP BoodhooBroken Link: http://jpboodhoo.com/ in person, and brief chats with Jeremy MillerBroken Link: http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/default.aspx, Scott BellwareBroken Link: http://codebetter.com/blogs/scott.bellware/, and Dave LaribeeBroken Link: http://codebetter.com/blogs/david_laribee.

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