Redmond, the center of the ALT.NET universe

...at least for the next three days

Tomorrow I'm hopping on a plane to Seattle/Redmond, WA to take part in the second ALT.NET Open Spaces Conference. I had the chance to be at the first one last October in Austin, TX and what a great experience that was.

My main motivation to attend the event in Austin was to learn from the more experienced folks how they adopted these practices and culture in their organizations. I wanted to participate in discussion about creating interest in self-improvement in my organization, my local .Net community, and eventually in the global .Net ecosystem.

The sessions I took part in included mostly these topics, like how can we help MSDN and MSDN Magazine become a great vehicle for spreading into the .Net community, among other things, practices that go beyond what Visual Studio shows in its Add » New Item, and the lessons that we can learn from the non-.Net space. The March 2008 issue of the magazine was a glimpse at what types of techniques and tools we could be seeing applied by more .Net developers, helping create more maintainable applications and more scalable development and support processes.

This time around I'm hoping to be in discussions that are more specific of Agile processes. I want to understand how to get started and how demonstrable Agile value really is. I'm tired of reading from people that quickly attached themselves to the Agile label just because it looks like the thing to do at the moment. I, for one have never experienced Agile in any organization I worked at. This event will give us a great opportunity to hear and question some of the people that are really employing Agile and experiencing some form of benefit from it. I want to make sure Agile isn't just another bandwagon.

There's always the risk that events like this become the proverbial echo chamber, where folks that think alike tap each other's back, celebrate their common thinking, and waste time discussion irrelevant technicalities. I'm happy to see a lot of blue badges and even people that I'm sure will be there to challenge ALT.NET to put up or shut up. One such individual is JDN — if you read the altdotnet mailing list you're familiar with his point of view. I think that is a good thing.

So, if you happen to be there too and see me, come and talk. That's why we are there for, right. And I'm not one of these guys that can only talk about software. I could spend hours chatting about other things like soccer and .... and ... darn it! Nevermind :)