Adam Tybor’s Blog

For those thinking that alt.net is negative and is divisive I remind of you David Laribee’s post several months ago about proposing the alt.net name. Now how can that mission be unclear, divisive, or negative?

If you have been doing agile, ddd, tdd, bdd, mvc, orm, ioc, di, and ci before alt.net, fantastic, so have most people in the software world. Alt.net is more than acronyms, practices, and tools. Its a mindset. Its trying help other .net community members think critically about their software and how their building it.

It is not about dictating policy, practice, or tooling. It is not about alienating people or ideas. It is about trying foster new growth within the .net community itself.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
– John Stuart Mill

I was privileged enough to attend the alt.net conference this weekend. Absolutely amazing, more on that later.

So what is alt.net, IMHO?

Alt.net is a community focused on finding practices and tools to engineer the best solution for your customer. Alt.net will challenge you to question your methodology. It will challenge you to face the fear to change. It will challenge you to question yourself, your team, your code, your tools. It will challenge you to be a better developer.

My favorite answer to many questions, I think I heard it over a 1000 times was, “it depends…” To me this phrase encapsulates everything about alt.net. As one attendee pointed out alt in the Mac world is option and that is what alt.net is about, options. How many ways are there to a skin cat? Which one is the best? “It depends”. Just give me options to skin the cat the best way for my given situation.