Alt.NET Day 2

I apologize for the delay of this post.  It was a great weekend and I learned a great deal about other developers and myself.  It has also made me hit the code harder.  I don’t know how Oren or

BREAKFAST

I had a chance to meet with some developers while eating breakfast. I had an opportunity to speak with Dru Sellers, added siteroot (it’s equivalent to ~/ in ASP.NET, scroll down to “Creating the layout”) to MonoRail, and Chris Patterson.  They were both articulate, intelligent, and a blast to chat with.

Here they are: (Chris on left, Dru on right)

Disclaimer: EVERY developer I had an opportunity to speak with was passionate, intelligent, excited about the sessions, and couldn’t wait to get back to their teams/jobs to help spread the knowledge.  I will stop stating the same thing over and over about each of these people that I met.

While enjoying breakfast with Nelson and Joe, Jay Flowers of CI Factory walked up with one of the best shirts I saw all conference.

Front:

SESSIONS

DSL I sat in this one for about 5 minutes because when everyone started looking around an no one knew who convened the session I decided to go check out the “Passion” session.  On my way out, Martin Fowler and Scott Guthrie were headed in.  I did a double take before deciding to continue to the other session.

PASSION I walked into this session late.  I missed JP Boodhoo’s intro (I really wish I hadn’t, I heard it was good).  I listened for a while.  When Rod Paddock asked, “How do you start passion amongst other team-mates or other teams you work with or user groups?”, my alpha personality and loud voice kicked in.  I mentioned items like blogs and the “Pragmatic Programmer” book by Thomas and Hunt.  I made the mistake of focusing on the tools and processes and if you notice the specific line from the Agile Manifesto, “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” you’ll understand (I am in no means stating that processes or tools are useless - check out the last line “That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more”).  I sometimes focus too much on the code.  Nothing makes me smile larger than beautiful code, but after this weekend I realized there is something more valuable:  watching another developer have that “aha” moment when they are coding, talking to another developer, etc.  It’s priceless (and THAT is what the ALT.net [place fav label here