The Inquisitive Coder – Davy Brion's Blog

Quite a few posts have been written lately on the state of the ALT.NET community, or movement or whatever else you want to consider or call it.  I’ve always thought of ALT.NET in 3 ways.

1. it is a mindset
2. it is a community
3. there is a movement

The ALT.NET mindset was originally described perfectly by Dave Laribee:

1. You’re the type of developer who uses what works while keeping an eye out for a better way.
2. You reach outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby, etc.
3. You’re not content with the status quo. Things can always be better expressed, more elegant and simple, more mutable, higher quality, etc.
4. You know 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 (e.g. Resharper.)

This mindset still lives on, and will always stay alive. There will always be .NET developers that are continuously looking for better ways to create software.  We might not think there are enough of them, but they are still growing gradually.  Typical ALT.NET topics, practices and principles have become much more popular and more and more people are definitely still looking to learn about them.  I can’t think of a single reason why this would ever cease to happen.

As a community, ALT.NET hasn’t done a good job (IMO) of being accessible to new-comers.  I’ve complained about this in August 2008.  Nothing changed after that post, and nothing will change after this post either.  A lot of the people in the ALT.NET community are still too negative in expressing their views, or have even stopped trying altogether.  Some of them just attacked everyone who disagreed with them.  Things like that will obviously never, ever lead to adoption of your thoughts and ideas.  And after that, they’d complain that nobody was listening anyway and that they were tired of trying to discuss these things with people who didn’t believe in it yet. It also doesn’t help that quite a few people got involved purely for the sake of bettering themselves.  After all, the ALT.NET name was hot and being associated with it and getting involved with it was an easy way to improve your reputation, status and for some even their finances.

As a movement, we’ve failed as well.  Essentially, the ALT.NET movement is about education.  Teaching people the things we believe in.  Showing them that there are better ways to develop software than that what is more accepted in the Microsoft world.  In the early stages of the movement, there was a tremendous amount of interesting blog posts being written with exactly that purpose in mind.  Teaching people.  Showing them the benefits.  Explaining things to them.   After a while though, some of those bloggers didn’t quite put the same effort into it anymore.  A lot of them resorted to one-liners about why approach A is better than approach B and they weren’t really taking the time anymore to try to educate people.  The rise of Twitter certainly didn’t help either since you simply can’t teach this stuff to people through 140-character tweets.  You can’t really show them the benefit of whatever it is that you think is a good thing to do.  And since a lot of those bloggers are spending more of their time on Twitter than on working on their blogs nowadays, a lot of valuable knowledge and experience isn’t being spread as much anymore as it used to.  Now obviously, we can’t tell people how to spend their time so if those people prefer to spend time on Twitter instead of writing good posts that could help more people, that is their personal choice and nobody can blame them for that.   At the same time, they can’t really complain about the current state of ALT.NET as a movement and a community either.

But hey, the mindset still lives and will continue on living.  The best thing you can do is to share your knowledge and experience with as many people that want to hear it.  And trust me, there are quite a few people who want to hear it.