Seattle Alt.Net open spaces

There was an open spaces event for the Seattle Alt .Net community on May 24th (I know, this post has been sitting around for a while just be glad I have insomnia tonight). I think I learn more in these open spaces events than anything else I've been to so my first advice is to find (or start) a local group and have these things.

Everyone has something to contribute

I think it was Dave Laribee (please correct me if I'm wrong) who said that "everyone here is a leader" at the last open spaces I went to. This is absolutely true. I find that everyone, no matter who they are, what their experience is, or what they work on, has something meaningful to say on something. That's one of the things I really like about these events.

The event

So this open spaces was at the offices of Lexis Nexis so I would like to publicly thank them for generously donating their space and providing lunch. Employer support of Alt .Net and these types of events is critical in ensuring that they happen and that the are accessible to all. I hope that everyone's company will follow Lexis Nexis' lead in supporting these types of events as they directly contribute to the education of their developers, and a company with good developers is more likely to be successful and deliver a better product.

We discussed a number of things at the event, most of which we were able to video, so I'm not going to spend a bunch of time recapping, however I will come back and edit this post with the links to the videos once they're are available.

The biggest thing that we got out of this event was a good foundation for a Seattle Alt .Net community. It turns out that there are a lot of us devs out there, definitely more than I had suspected, that are interested in this whole Alt .Net thing. In fact, it's looking like our open spaces is going to be a monthly thing (last I heard we're going for the fourth Saturday of the month) so I'm excited about seeing where this is going to go. If you are interested (you should be) you should subscribe to our google group and start coming to these things. Remember, everyone is welcome and everyone has something to contribute. Seriously, you should come to our next event. Even if you disagree with everything Alt .Net is, come out anyway and see what we're all about (and if you do disagree with everything, by all means share your opinions because maybe you've thought of something that none of us have).

The next event will be on June 28th at:

Mantis Technology Group, Inc.
12413 Willows Road NE
Suite 300
Kirkland, WA 98034

I'll see you there!