In the wake of
Philly and
Pittsburgh ALT.NET groups, those of us in the Washington DC area felt it was time to address some of these issues in our area as well. For those unfamiliar with ALT.NET, here are the kinds of developers that are ALT.NET as defined by
David Laribee:
- Is always keeping an eye out for a better way.
- Reaches outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby, etc.
- Is not content with the status quo. Things can always be better expressed, more elegant and simple, more mutable, higher quality, etc.
- Believes tools are great, but they only take you so far. It’s the principles and knowledge that really matter. The best tools are those that embed the knowledge and encourage the principles
David Tchepak said it best when he stated:
"We are a group of people who are passionate about improving the way
we develop software.
We recognize there is no single solution, but instead there are
multitudes of alternatives that can be applied to different situations.
Our community is a place for sharing these alternatives, so that
together we can learn, teach, and encourage new ideas."
So, you may ask yourself, there are already groups out in the DC area, such as
CapArea.NET,
RockNUG,
CMAP,
DC XP Users group among others. They are great user groups that put on a lot of great events that I have attended time and time again and at some point presented at one of them. It's my belief that this group can supplement them nicely and help each other out. Many of these groups spend a lot of time talking about the new things coming from Microsoft. That's a very good thing, but that's not what we're aiming for. The goal of this group is to form very active discussion groups and find new and better ways to develop software. This group practices the Open Space Technology and encourages people to bring topics to talk about.
Another goal of ours is to have roaming locations. Our goal is to hold meetings in many different locations in the DC and Baltimore metro area so that all won't have to fight DC area traffic to find the group that best meets their interests.
Jeremy Jarrell and
Brian Donahue have been a great help in setting this up and defining the goals of the group as a whole. We also have great people involved in our group such as
Scott Allen.
We have set up a
Mailing list for the group and a site and wiki are forthcoming. Our first meeting is this Thursday, 12/13/2007. Join the mailing list and find out more. Come out and see us!
