ALT.NET Conference - Opening Day..Opening Thoughts

I'm currently in Austin, Texas where I'm attending the ALT.NET conference.  This conference is essentially a who's who of thought leaders in the .NET agile/open source community - everyone from Martin Fowler to Jim Newkirk to Scott Hanselman to Scott Bellware - the list goes on and on.  In sum, over half of the people that you wanted listed as wanting to hear from in MSDN Magazine are attending this conference.

The conference is being conducted in a format called Open Spaces.  This is one of the coolest things that I've ever seen in conferences.  Basically, after a brief round of introductions, we launched into tonight's main activity - determining the schedule for the remainder of the conference.  On a whiteboard was a 2-dimensional matrix - available rooms on the y-axis; time slots on the x-axis.  Anybody that had an idea for a session wrote down the idea on a post-it note, presented it to the group, and placed it into a time slot.  Once all the slots had been filled additional ideas were placed in a general holding space.  Once all the ideas were collected, every individual marked which sessions they were interested in attending and based on this feedback, the schedule was renegotiated.  It's worth pointing out that in this type of conference, there is no distinction between presenter and attendee.  Everyone just shows up to whatever they are interested in.  If you aren't interested in a session, get up and go.  If you get sucked into a conference in the hallway - cool.  It's incredibly exciting.

So there were 2 comments that I thought were really noteworthy/funny in tonight's opening session.  The first was as follows.

"The values support the tools."

I'm not sure I buy this.  I think that the values support the tools if you have values that make you interested in values.  I think that many developers are perfectly content with using whatever tools they are presented with (e.g. - not going in search of 'better' tools) to do the job that they are being paid to do - solve the problems that they are being paid to solve.  I'm not trying to make a value judgement on this group of developers (though I admit, it does kind of sound that way).  At the same time, I believe that this is a reality, and as such, focusing on 'instilling values' is not the approach to take if the goal is to change behavior.  I imagine that this theme will reoccur throughout this weekend.  And that leads us to the second notable quote - ala Scott Hanselman.

"Mort is crying because mommy and daddy are fighting."

So in case you missed all of the conversations from last year on the blogosphere, Mort is the Microsoft persona to describe the group that I talked about in the previous paragraph.  Unfortunately, Mort has become somewhat of a derogatory term as of late since he is used more as an accusatory glass that different communities and Microsoft throw at one another when arguing over products, methodologies, etc... you know - 'values'.  As a result, Mort is sitting quietly on the sidelines wondering why Microsoft and it's community thought leaders can't get along - and he here's his name mentioned in so many arguments, he wonders "could it be me?"

Why do I care about this?  Because I love agile - I love DDD, TDD, BDD, patterns, NHibernate, R#, et al.  And I want to introduce more and more of this type of content into MSDN Magazine.  However, I think that many of you who read the magazine are not as zealous in programming ideology as many here at the conference - and that's ok.  What I refuse to do is allow the magazine to become a forum for the next religious war - to basically take the "C++ rules - VB sucks" argument and turn it into "ALT rocks - Mort sucks".  So, for those of you who want more content on all of the cool agile things mentioned above, me too.  For those of you who don't care about all of the ideology, that's cool too.  I am interested in seeing MSDN Magazine provide practical solutions to all of its readers, no matter where they are on the programmer continuum.  I think that a strong case can be made for many of the tools/methods in the agile space - and I want to present them in the Magazine in a way that provides a real incentive for using them.  That incentive?  Making programming easier and more enjoyable - not buying into a set of values.

Until tomorrow...