Let’s stop talking about alt.net and starting writing code

I recently read Ian Cooper’s blog regarding the current state of Alt.net. There has (in my opinion at least) been a growing sense of disillusionment within the alt.net community of late and Ian has given some good arguments for some of the most common complaints. I completely agree with him on the points he made, Alt.net was and still remains to be an incredibly important part of the .net community. The principles that David Laribee laid out have had a massive impact on the .net landscape; use of alternative languages is common place (Rake seems thankfully to be replacing NAnt), everyone knows how much money and time TDD will save (i’ve got a little bit of addiction for that green light) and the owners of JetBrains will be happy to hear that any dev worth his salt knows the R# was written by god himself.

My issues with alt.net arises from the fact that we seem to talk about the same things over and over and over and over again. I get it, IoC, ReST and TDD are all awesome but you are preaching to the converted! Yes, there are many people out there that have never used these tools and do not understand their benefits. Unfortunately very few (if any) of those people actually come to these events because they just don’t care that much about it. I understand that this is a battle some people want to fight but not me, I’m more interested in writing code. Personally I feel we must accept that people who actually give a damn about code are in the minority and move on to much more interesting things.

What about new members to the alt.net community you might ask? From people I have spoken to, the learning curve to entering the Alt.net community is actually quite high. There is also a degree of elitism; try telling an alt.net’er you don’t know what IoC is and enjoy the look of horror on their face. We need to lower the barrier to entering the community and make a more active effort to include new members who are genuinely interested in writing good code. You never know they could build the best thing since sliced MVC.

London is very lucky to have lots of people doing free talks tools that they have created/played with (many thanks to skillsmatter for helping organising them). These talks are really important in helping exposing developers to new technologies but what about ideas/skills which are difficult to distill into a 30min talk e.g. how to create a well architected app? what’s the best way to test a legacy app? These sort of practical skills are ultimately much more important than using some new technology yet there seems to little available knowledge. If people are genuinely interested in helping to build a better .net community then I feel we need to stop talking about the alt.net principles and start looking at how we can apply them to actual problems.

Alt.net has produced all these great ideas which people have taken on board and gone off and built some really cool things. I think we need to start sharing what we have learnt in a format which encourages sharing of practical knowledge between developers.

So what am I proposing? Put simply I think we should have a way for people to publish problems/ideas they have which that require a technical implementation. These ideas can be anything really (e.g. a game, problem at work, etc). Ideally though they should be something which is a bit of fun (we spend all day at work doing boring dev work, this should be about having fun writing code). If other people are interested in the idea then you can work together (whether in the same place or remotely) on the project. If there are specific skills that you dont have but need then you should be able to contact the community and find a specialist (e.g. solr, BDD) who can give you some guidance. Every month we can all meet up and demo our projects (similar to what Y. Combinator does). This gives us a chance to get together, discuss our problems & solutions and get some advice from other devs (oh and a good excuse for a drink).

I think if we concentrate more on writing actual code to solve fun problems, using the alt.net principles and community to help build the best solution, then we would all greatly benifit. What do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts!

James