This weekend ALT.NET organized a full day of workshops at Informator in Stockholm. About 30 to 40 participants could choose among workshops with topics such as Fluent NHibernate, JavaScript, CSS, Introduction to Python, Parallel Programming in VS2010 and Acceptance Test Driven Development with Selenium. After the workshops a bunch of us ended up at Vapiano (as usual!) having interesting discussions and generating great ideas over food and drinks. Ideas man Carl Kenne delivered, as expected, a few good ones: ALT.NET Incubator to help people get started on stuff, a 24 hour business camp for Open Source projects, and more that maybe will be revealed (i.e., remembered) in time on the ALT.NET Discussion Group. Someone wanted to invite professors from his university to come meet developers in the field, and so on so forth.
What I like about these participatory ALT.NET events is how easy they are to organize. One guy (new colleague at Avega Group Anders Jönsson this time) suggests that it’s time for another unconference, workshop day or whatever, on the discussion group and the thread catches on with people chiming in what kind of workshops they want or are able to run. Another guy (Tibi Covaci) suggests a venue (Informator), there’s some voting about a suitable date and suddenly all you have to do is show up wanting to learn!
If you haven’t been to any of the ALT.NET gatherings yet you should definitely come next time - it’s always fun and you always learn a lot! Meanwhile, be sure to partake in the discussions and why not post your own idea for the next event?