I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural meeting of the Philly ALT.NET meeting yesterday. It's a convenient (~1 Hour) train ride to Philadelphia from New York City, so I really had no excuse not to attend and I was interested in the subject being presented. Brian Donahue founded the group as the ALT.NET movement started to gather steam and, with some help from his brother Dan, delivered a talk covering a wide variety of topics (IoC, TDD, AJAX, MVC) centering on MonoRail. A good number of people (~30) turned out and all were very social types. Great conversation all-in-all.
Brian should be commended. It takes a lot to prepare a good talk, never mind all the details and tasks associated with feeding and sheltering quite a throng of developers. Thanks should also be given to the Weblink for providing pizza, soda, and beer, and to Independents Hall for providing the space. I spent the day working from Independents Hall and, let me tell you, what a cool place to work. I wish we had something like that in NYC; I could save a lot of money on office space.
It was great to meet a number of people I've been following in blogs, see some familiar faces, and always nice to connect with new people. I've volunteered to come out and do a talk on Agile practices in February and hope to drop in from time to time.
What's next?
So Philly ALT.NET was a smashing success, fun times had by all, good people, beer, etc. That's great but the true measure of success here is going to be the velocity of the group meeting over meeting. Thirty people is a good number, so growth isn't too much of an issue (though people should bring others if they can!)
I wonder if we can we bring ideas or some of the spirit from Open Spaces into the local meet-up format? Don't get me wrong, Brian and Dan covered a valuable and important topic from the ALT.NET world, but how can we up the collaboration and challenge the traditional stand-and-deliver model? Philly is the ideal place to incubate and experiment with these ideas. Various historic similitudes shouldn't be lost in the shuffle or discounted.
Where else will these groups spring up? Hopefully wherever there are a handful of open and interested minds.
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Special thanks to Mark Magliocco for letting me use the image above. He has a good write-up and some more pictures on his blog, so check it out.