{"id":780,"date":"2009-02-08T22:39:08","date_gmt":"2009-02-08T21:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=780"},"modified":"2010-01-29T21:56:14","modified_gmt":"2010-01-29T20:56:14","slug":"altnet_unconference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2009\/02\/08\/altnet_unconference\/","title":{"rendered":"ALT.NET Unconference"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nYesterday I attended an “unconference” organised by the Swedish ALT.NET group<\/a>. An unconference is like a conference except it’s free, informal and mostly self-organizing.\n<\/p>\n

\nThis unconference had two parts: first a series of “lightning talks”, i.e. brief presentations of up to 10 minutes, and then an “Open Space”<\/a>, i.e. a set of self-organizing discussions. (The Wikipedia page explains quite well how the “self-organizing” part works, and it actually worked surprisingly well.)\n<\/p>\n

\nBoth parts were fruitful and interesting. The lightning talks were a good way to get started and to get our brains moving, but the bulk of the action happened in the Open Space discussions. The topics ranged from Domain-specific languages<\/i> through Traditional roles in Agile projects<\/i> to Working with legacy code<\/i>.\n<\/p>\n

\nI wanted to take part as a pig rather than a chicken<\/a>, to use a Scrum metaphor, so I held a talk myself, about continuous integration<\/a> – how we’ve implemented it in our project, and why I think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. Apparently I made an impression on at least one listener<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nI got somewhat spoiled at my previous job. At a global firm with a large number of excellent developers, there were always presentations to attend, debates to follow, people to learn from. Now that I work in a very small team of rather more ordinary developers, I don’t get that kind of inspiration and information served on a silver platter any more, and need to look for it more actively.\n<\/p>\n

\nI’ve also come to realise that I care more about code quality and good design than the rest of my team, and sometimes the uphill struggle against a morass of ugly old code gets a bit demoralizing. It was nice to meet people whose values and ideals are more aligned with mine, and who grapple with similar problems.\n<\/p>\n

\nI went home yesterday with two book tips, one tool to try out, some good advice, and a renewed sense of energy and inspiration. I’m looking forward to the next ALT.NET event already!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I attended an “unconference” organised by the Swedish ALT.NET group. An unconference is like a conference except it’s free, informal and mostly self-organizing. This unconference had two parts: first a series of “lightning talks”, i.e. brief presentations of up to 10 minutes, and then an “Open Space”, i.e. a set of self-organizing discussions. (The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[159,156],"class_list":["post-780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geeky_things","tag-alt_net","tag-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1400,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions\/1400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}