Wednesday, January 21, 2009

First Meeting. One out of three ain't bad

Well apart for the use of the word ain't.

Anyway, in order to have a meeting we'll need a venue, a date/time and a topic.

The plan at the moment is to have our first meeting Wednesday 11th February. After the first one we'll aim to meet on the 2nd Wednesday of each month. I would have made it the 3rd one except that I'll be in Vegas for the 3rd/4th week of March. Anyway the way it is it's the week after the Perth .NET CoP one each month.

I'm still looking for a venue but if I don't find one on time we'll meet in a pub somewhere. I do have a few irons in the fire here but if you have a suggestion about an awesome venue idea then let me know.

Tell me what you want to talk about. There are so many potential topics and I am happy to talk about pretty much all of them. You can leave a comment on this post, participate in the conversation on the ozaltdotnet mailing list or send me an email directly on michael.minutillo@gmail.com.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Welcome to the Perth ALT.NET Group

Calling all .NET Professionals living in Perth, Western Australia.

This is the official announcement of an ALT.NET Group here in Perth. It is my hope that this group will provide a local forum for discussion of the practices, values and tools which have been put forward by the ALT.NET international group. If you don't know whether or not ALT.NET is something you are willing to stand behind ask yourself if any of the following apply to you:

From the homepage of altnetpedia:

Are you...

  • 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


...then you're in the right place!

At the moment the plan is for the group to meet monthly for discussion, presentations and coding practice (in the form of a CodingDojo). I am still working on organizing the first one where part of the agenda will be to figure out where we as a group see this heading.

If you'd like to help out, present or suggest a topic or propose a schedule I'd love to hear from you. You can leave a comment here on the blog or send me (Mike) an email directly.

More information on the first session will appear here as it becomes available so please subscribe to the feed.