Caffeinated Coder

I’m currently en route to Seattle to attend my second ALT.NET conference, so I thought I would take the opportunity to organize some pre-conference thoughts.

ALT.NET in a Nutshell (at least by my reckoning)

Alt.NET is a nascent, loosely organized ideology that started as a vibrant blogosphere reaction to this post by David Laribee and has since evolved into a number of conferences, user group meetings, and mailing list discussions.

Alt.NET conversations I’ve followed tend to focus on…

• Shifting the emphasis away from the latest and greatest API and towards a discussion of sound principles and practices that transcend specific technologies.
• Shunning “Demoware” and visual designers that offer quick, flashy functionality at the expense of long-term maintainability.
• Taking a “best of breed” approach to tools and frameworks and frequently looking to the open source community or competing vendors rather than the traditional Microsoft fare to enhance the .NET development experience.
• Fostering a healthy debate regarding the best way to develop software, thus shifting learning away from a vendor-centric, how-to learning experience toward a more interactive dialog.

The canonical example of an Alt.NET view of the world is the vocal criticism by many in this community of the Entity Framework. Most Alt.NET’ers prefer open source ORM alternatives, such as NHibernate or Ibatis.NET, because unlike the Entity Framework they follow the principal of persistence ignorance, which removes database dependencies from the code thus allowing business objects to be tested more easily and cheaply. While this position may seem like common sense to many, it is considered “Alternative” to most because it challenges the default behavior of many executives and mainstream developers who are more comfortable with following Microsoft’s lead on all technical issues.

If you want more information on the question of “What is Alt.NET?”, I recommend reading this short MSDN article by Jeremy Miller . If you have some free slots in your podcasting queue now that lawn-mowing season has started, then I also recommend the Hanselminutes episode with David Laribee or the recent DNR episode with Laribee and Jeremy Miller. You can also read about some of my own impressions of the first conference in Austin along with a humorous pictoral retort that I put together in response to some of the public criticisms of the conference being too elitist.

Why am I in the cheap seats?

A quick glance at the participants list reveals a high number of well-known speakers, authors, tool creators, and bloggers. I was a little bit star-struck by being surrounded by such a high concentration of geek fame during the last conference and this time around the participant list is even more impressive. I would consider this group to occupy the box seats in my little sports event analogy and I’m not even close to being there. In fact the guards would probably beat me mercilessly if I even deigned to stare wistfully at this section for too long.

Next comes the middle seats. These are the ones occupied by the B-List bloggers and dedicated open source contributors. I hadn’t heard of many in this group before, but was duly impressed last time with their extensive experience with topics that I only had a cursory knowledge of, such as Domain Driven Design, Behavior Driven Development, DSL’s, IoC Containers, MVC Frameworks, and Mocking containers. Unfortunately, I’m not in this group either.

That leaves the cheap seats. That is where those of us who are seasoned developers and agree with the alt.net principles, but have little experience with most of the tools and practices discussed at the event sit. Last time I mostly just shut up, listened, and tried to learn a few things while sitting in this section. Although lurkers are not generally appreciated at an open spaces event like this, I was at least comforted by the thought that I might eventually help spread the good word to my fellow Joe-developers back in the trenches.

I’m afraid I am destined to sit in the same section this time around. I’ll do my best to be a more active participant in conversations, but realistically I still don’t have enough experience with most of the popular ALT.NET tools and concepts to shed my lurker ways just yet. So, if you see a little unobtrusive speck high up in the nose bleed section of the conference, that is probably me.

What am I hoping to gain from the cheap seats of the conference?

1. Feel more stupid than I do now - My primary professional growth strategy so far has been to surround myself with really smart people in hopes that I will learn something by osmosis. I’m pretty sure this will be one of those situations. One unfortunate side effect of this approach is that I am perpetually humbled, which makes it really difficult to bask in the glow of a good old fashioned geek superiority complex. However, it is a small price to pay for all the fancy new developer tricks I learn.
2. Improve my criteria for evaluating tools and products - The one thing that prevents this type of gathering from devolving into a geek popularity contest based on which tools you use is the genuine attempt by most of the participants to define somewhat objective criteria by which to judge technology. For example, if I explain to my coworkers that we should use NHibernate instead of the Entity Framework and or the MVC Framework instead of WebForms, then I want to be able to articulate that these products are inherently more testable, which will help us modify our applications more quickly and with less risk. This type of approach tends to hold much more sway in the IT world than the old standby “all the cool kids are using it” argument.
3. Explore the development landscape - The .NET open source community may be relatively young and small compared to the Java community, but it nevertheless represents an overwhelmingly enormous amount of information for one person to sift through. When you throw on top of that the deluge of technologies being released by Microsoft as well as all of the relevant competing vendor products, then there is simply no way to adequately survey the development landscape other than through a sharing of ideas by passionate developers with diverse experiences in conferences like this.
4. Finally meet people I know - Huh? It sounds weird, but in the last year I’ve corresponded with a large number of people through blogging and tweeting. It seems that most of them will be in attendance this weekend. The small, open space format of this conference is ideal for making and strengthening professional contacts and becoming more engaged with the developer community. While google is still my fallback research tool of choice, I’ve been amazed at how valuable the daily conversations I have over email, twitter, and blog comment sections with like-minded developers all over the world can be. Hopefully this weekend will help me begin to tune into and use the developer community even more effectively.

In conclusion, I’m obviously excited about this weekend, despite my relatively lowly status on the ALT.NET food chain.

If you’re new to ALT.NET, I highly recommend attending one of the upcoming conferences or joining one the main mailing list to find out for yourself what all they hype is about.

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