A year ago I attended the Patterns & Practices Summit in Redmond, WA. It was a pretty typical conference: keynote speakers, 450+ attendees, bad lunches. But one of the really cool things that happened during the conference was getting to chat with Brad Wilson in the hallway along with about ten other folks on subjects like CAB, MVP/MVC, unit testing and how to map data for display purposes.
The hallway conversations were great; the best part of the conference. And now I’m at ALT.NET, where the entire conference is one big hallway conversation. It is a really cool way to hold a conference.
The Open Spaces format is quite different from a typical conference. Instead of planned speakers, the attendees get together and determine the content and then they gather together in various conference rooms and have those “hallway conversations”. It’s incredibly cool – very organic and free flowing – the conversations can cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time and tend to bleed over into other areas. For instance, I ended up in a really cool impromptu session with Scott Guthrie discussing language features of .NET 3.0 (and some stuff that is somewhat unknown in .NET 2.0). It was a great session.
The great part about this format is that novices in an area can ask questions and experts can answer. There’s not one authority on anything trying to preach a single viewpoint, but instead a collection of people with varying degrees of expertise sharing ideas. Everyone learns, everyone benefits. It’s one of the best environments I’ve ever been in.
Starstuck
I’ve been starstruck with the sheer amount of talent and knowledge that is here. As I overheard at one table, if a bomb went off in Austin, a whole lot of great .NET minds would be lost. Some of the people in attendance: Scott Hansleman, Jeremy Miller, Scott Bellware, Scott Guthrie, Peter Provost, Brad Wilson, Jean-Paul Boodhoo and Martin Fowler. Yes, even Martin Freaking Fowler showed up! It has been great to meet many of the people whose blogs I read. What’s really cool: everyone here has passion for development, and no one is afraid to speak their mind. It’s infectious being around this many people who have a real desire to find the best tools and practices for .NET development, and then to bring those discoveries to the rest of the .NET development world.
It’s just the beginning… More to come.