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. 

We started our local ALT.NET meetings in August, and have been doing them monthly ever since. We usually discuss a certain technical topic (or a few of them), although we sometimes have someone do a presentation as well. Either way, there’s a lot of great stuff to learn from these meetings, so if you’re a .NET developer who would like to keep improving your skills, be sure to sign up

So, if you had to give a short talk (remember, only 10 minutes) about TDD, targeted to an audience that has little to no experience with it, or may not even know anything about it, what are the things you’d really want to highlight? And what are the things that probably aren’t worth mentioning for such a short talk?

Or for those of you who have little to no experience with, or knowledge about TDD, what are the things you’d like to hear if someone were to introduce the concept to you in about 10 minutes?

Now, just so everyone is clear on this: i consider myself a part of that community and i definitely want to see it become successful. But for that to happen, i think we need to make some changes. The biggest problem is that we are often perceived as being elitist, and according to some people closed-minded. And honestly, there’s a lot of truth to that. Just read our mailinglists, our blog posts, our ‘tweets’ (i don’t use twitter so i don’t know if that’s the correct way of referring to it but you know what i mean) and a lot of the material we put out there in general. Not everyone in this community is guilty of it, but a lot of us (myself included) are.

In general, we are extremely opinionated and we often state our opinions with a “our way or the highway” kind of mentality. We often outright dismiss approaches or solutions that do not follow our principles and values. And we usually do it in a manner which comes across in a very negative way. And it’s really not hard to see why that puts a lot of people off. When someone simply tells me i need to do something in a certain way, my natural reflex is to question it. Why should i do it that way? If i don’t get a sound response to that (and one-liners usually don’t cut it), the person (or company or whatever) who made the claim immediately loses credibility in my book. I can definitely see how some people have felt that way after hearing/reading certain ALT.NET people making their claims without properly backing them up or simply brushing off any questioning of those claims.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being opinionated and voicing those opinions. But we really should try to do so in a more positive manner. Simply stating that all developers should use certain practices or principles just doesn’t work. We have to formulate our messages better and we probably need to provide more material that properly explains why practice X or principle Y or library Z allows us to achieve better results. And most importantly, we need to make sure we’re able to discuss these things with anyone who’s not yet ‘into it’ or even against it, without putting people off. If a lot of people think that we’re elitist, closed-minded, frustrated, annoying, or whatever (and they do, just google it) then we are clearly not doing a good job. If we really want to spread these practices and principles that we value so much, we can’t afford to rub so many people the wrong way.

As i mentioned in the beginning of my post, i’ve definitely made these mistakes on quite a few occasions. And i’m gonna try to change that from now on. So if you see me repeat those mistakes, please direct me to this post

From altdotnet.org:

We are a self-organizing, ad-hoc community of developers bound by a desire to improve ourselves, challenge assumptions, and help each other pursue excellence in the practice of software development.

And that is really the essence of what ALT.NET is about. It is about continuous improvement, and sharing knowledge. Nothing more, nothing less. Whatever concept or tool that allows us to improve either ourselves or the way we work, should be used. No matter where the concept came from, or who created the tool.

We are often thought of as being anti-Microsoft. And although some of us probably are, that’s not what it’s about. We want quality. We want to work with as little friction as possible. I am pretty sceptical (to say the least) whenever Microsoft promises us the latest and greatest in whatever new product they’re working on, because i’ve felt the pain of their latest and greatest far too often to blindly believe whatever claims they make. But if they release something that allows me to do what i want to do without restricting my development habits (and i think ASP.NET MVC is looking pretty good on that front) then i will use it. Gladly even. Because i really don’t care where a tool or a library comes from, as long as it’s good. I definitely have my preferred set of libraries/tools but i’ll drop them in a heartbeat when something better comes along.

So when is a developer ‘ALT.NET’? According to altnetpedia.com, you are ALT.NET if you are:

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

Now tell me: How on earth did it ever get this far in our industry for this mindset to be considered alternative?

So, if you speak Dutch and you’re truly interested in learning how to be a better developer, all you have to do is sign up and keep your eyes and ears open. Oh and you’re more than welcome to participate as well obviously

Why don’t we just create a Dutch ALT.NET group? I’m willing to spend time, effort and money on this. Basically, what i want is sessions or even small conferences in Belgium or the Netherlands with typical ALT.NET content. That doesn’t mean it will be restricted to be about Nhibernate, or Castle, or any specific project or company. It has to be about concepts, techniques and approaches that will enable us to improve as software developers/designers/architects/… Of course, talking about specific products or projects can’t be avoided, but the concepts behind it should be the most important.

I know there are at least a half dozen people (and it’s really gotta be more than that) in Belgium that would be interested in something like this, so we really should try to get something going. Even if it just starts as discussing good software development in a bar over some beers, or organizing sessions, it doesn’t really mattter… as long as we’re learning and improving. And who knows where it can go from there.

Anyways… if anyone is interested in this, please get in touch with me (ralinx at davybrion.com) or comment on this post.

Update: apparently, there is some interest in this so i’ve set up the following google group:
http://groups.google.com/group/dutchaltdotnet