October 7, 2007
THE CULT OF ALT (and the Fable of Free Pizza)
by Brian Donahue
Although I am just a follower in this new CULT OF ALTBroken Link: http://altnetconf.com/, the backlash that the organizers are getting from some of the .NET community is starting to sound eerily familiar to me. At my last job, a group of developers used to get together at lunch and watch a screencast or discuss blog posts that taught us something new about our jobs. These were people I liked working with, and we had good conversations and applied new ideas to our projects. We didn't ask for company sponsorship - we bought our own food, etc. After getting comfortable with some of the new things I was learning, I decided to try to invite our whole development group to come see some of the stuff we were doing. Without going through any "official" process, I sent an email to everyone saying I would do this during a lunch hour - all were welcome, bring your own lunch.
One of my development co-workers responded very quickly with a long email telling me how I *should* be doing this lunch and learn. I should have invited the WHOLE company (it was focused on the ASP AJAX library, at the code level) and get Human Resources involved and have them announce it and order pizza for everyone, because as he said, "no one will want to come unless there's food." (Surprisingly, this was a guy who was not interested in other company-sponsored learning like the book groups we did, etc.)
I replied that I had no intention of jumping through all those hurdles and waiting for management sign-off just so I could share some cool tricks with the developers. And frankly - I didn't care if people weren't coming because I wasn't buying pizza. It was about learning something new.
Many times it's easier to do something on a small, grass roots level with like-minded people. It doesn't mean you are trying to HIDE anything from the larger whole. Trying to involve a 100 people in something that may or may not be of interest to them is a not a fun hill to climb. It's easier to start small, and SPREAD THE LOVE. Maybe I should be getting upset that there is a new "MS Office Geek" sub-group in my .NET User Group and no one reached out to me to explain what is so cool about Office and help me be part of the group.
So, to SamBroken Link: http://samgentile.com/blogs/samgentile/archive/2007/10/06/goodbye-codebetter-and-alt-net.aspx, to Frans, to ColinBroken Link: http://colinramsay.co.uk/2007/10/07/abandon-altnet/ - all obviously smart, capable developers - and others who have distanced themselves from ALT.NET and labeled it some sort of separatist movement, I have a couple questions:
What are you doing to bring some of the better practices and ideas now lumped under the ALT.NET moniker to the larger community?
Why not be constructive and help spread the passion for these things that many of us have?
Do you think that accusing a group of incredibly smart leaders in the .NET community of starting some sort of cliquey cult is going to help strengthen the .NET community? And yes, I know that a couple posts have been written by them that were abrasive and probably ill-advised. Have you yourself never written a blog post that caused some negative reaction? Have you ever seen a blogger rant against something when they were caught up in the moment? Passionate people do this - and I'd rather work with someone whose passionate than someone who doesn't give a shit.
One of the biggest themes at the ALT.NET conference was about finding better ways to spread passion and learning in the .NET community through user groups, at our workplaces, through blogs and web sites, etc.
There wasn't a single session about "how do we keep Mort out of our clique!?" In fact, many of us talked about our dislike of the whole "Mort" term anyway. I say if we abandon anything - let's abandon that.
If you hate the name - help name it something else. There was endless debate on the name at the conference, but no one could think of anything that either made sense, or wasn't going to be seen as divisive to *someone*. The least "offensive" name that came up was "Pragmatic.NET" and I can just hear it now, "Oh, so Mort isn't pragmatic?!?!?!" That's the mindset we're up against. (whoops, I wanted to drop the Mort deal, but I was pretending to be a naysayer, dammit! :P )
Finally, I think it's just ludicrous to accuse the leaders of ALT.NET of not doing enough to teach people about what they do. I didn't get any special invitation when I found the blogs of JP BoodhooBroken Link: http://jpboodhoo.com/, Ayende, Jeremy MillerBroken Link: http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller, Scott BellwareBroken Link: http://codebetter.com/blogs/scott.bellware, and even Colin Ramsay! Probably originally heard one of them on DotNetRocks - the most mainstream, biggest .NET show there is - and followed links from there. I never noticed a "Drag and Droppers KEEP OUT!" sign on any of their blogs.
I've heard more talk about separatism, exclusivity, cliques and everything else negative from the people that are bashing ALT.NET. At the conference, I heard almost 100% talk of *inclusiveness* and helping spread the passion and knowledge of some of these things we are so interested in. Is it a group of perfect angels who will always say the right thing? No. Show me that community - That's probably the cult your looking for.
Is it all just the name??
Broken Link: http://technorati.com/tag/cult