Posts Tagged “alt-net-israel”
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ALT.NET Israel #2 – registration link
Guys (and gals?) - I’ve just setup a facebook event for registration. I believe that it’s url is http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=58042408643hooo haaaa !
ALT.NET Israel #2
Hoora – it’s time !
April 2nd and 3rd, at Sela Univesity.
Details are on the alt.net israel’s usergroup:
http://groups.google.com/group/altnetisrael/browse_thread/thread/4ab4329c4bdd8253 (hebrew)
A big THANK YOU to Sela University for hosting us for the second time now. Sela – you rock.
Signup link will be published shortly.
If you’re in Israel during, pop by and join the fun.
see ya there
ALT.NET Israel is flickred
Prepare to be surprised …
http://flickr.com/photos/arikfr/2753627777/in/set-72157606676239795
On google insights - do numbers always count?
A dude on the ALT.NET Israel mailing list has given the new Google Insights a few things to chew on.
For example, he’s shown that there is much more interest in ASP.NET MVC over MonoRail.
So a wonder came up, whether one should choose a framework or a technology should it be highly searched for.
my take on the matter:
- even if many people have searched for A, they might have found it, and decided against it.
- even if many of them do like or work with A, it doesn’t mean it’s right for me.
I’d look for this type of people in the tech community.
People that:
- Are very professional, highly skilled, ones I do want to get help from;
- Have shown interest in helping the community, rather than asking questions.
- Can, on top of answering questions and giving advice, fix and improve the said technology themselves or using my suggestions/patches on the spot thus improving my productivity
No matter how you’d turn the search statistics, based on parameter 3 only, any OSS will be way ahead a closed source solution.
Gustavo Ringel also had a say:
I see a lot of articles about how to do stupid things with typed datasets, and much less about how to do great things with ORM’s…should i had go for typed datasets instead of NHibernate or other ORM because i have more help of less skilled people?
ALT.NET Israel conf update
Due to the large volume of participants, we needed a larger venue.
Sela Group has generously agreed to accommodate the conference in their building.
So, see you there this Thursday at 18:30
On babies, entities, controllers and confidence votes
The Sharks Here in Israel, there’s a reality/documentary TV show called “The Sharks”.
It’s about people who have some kind of a business idea, and are looking for investors.
Each entrepreneur gets a few minutes to present their idea and business plan in front of 4-5 well-known Israeli businessmen, trying to get their support in return for percentages of their project.
One can differentiate the totally bad projects with possibly OK projects, simply on the basis of a proper preparations. Some projects are simply vague ideas that popped up on someone’s head, without any business plan of any kind.
Then you have the projects that comes with a detailed business plan, market research, pricing policies and what-not. These are of course the ones that the Sharks (potential investors) show interest in. The interesting bit is that most of the times, instead of asking strictly business related questions, they tend give more importance to the actual usability of the proposed product/service/whatever. They try to get in the head of the potential consumers and look for Achilles’ heels from the user’s point of view.
Solving consumer problems The point is, that you cannot create a product or service to solve problems that you think that people have. You have to solve actual problems that potential consumers are facing.
Paraphrasing DHH from a presentation lately, “It’s not Rocket Surgery”. You should simply solve people’s problems, otherwise they won’t be interested.
self consumer Who is the better consumer than yourself?
Example: There’s this person I know, who will sell you baby carriers. They look very simple in first glance, but then you see that it’s actually pretty useful - it’s adjustable, you can re-use the same carrier in several carrying positions (low, high, front, back), and it’s comfortable for parent and baby. The thing is - she didn’t wake up one day with a crazy idea, hoping it’d match someone’s needs. She made one for herself and her baby, making it better with time, and then thought - ‘hey someone else might like it’
Going back to DHH and his presentation, he states there clearly that the whole RubyOnRails thing was simply something he needed for his day job, so it became very useful, as the consumer (himself) was giving him direct feedback during the development process.
Same can be said on many OSS projects, like NHibernate, the whole Castle stack and many more.
I can testify on AspView, which I created to make my day job easier and more fun, as I disliked WebForms and my employer insisted on ASP.NET and C# all around - that was my best shot. I got immediate feedbacks from the consumer (myself and my team members) so it stayed focused on solving consumer needs.
Demonstrate trust in your tools You should be trustworthy. I evangelise the use of good tools, and I name the Castle stack, NHibernate, Rhino Commons, and more as good tools. I can do this whole heartedly since I use these very tools for my day jobs, on paid projects, not only for pet projects.
And if you are not a consumer Take ASP.NET MVC. This project is being internally run by a team of developers, who their day job is to build this tool, not to use it. On the surface it presents a major problem, no consumer feedback.
The way they chose to solve this problem was pretty simple. Expose as much as you can to the public. Push potential users to play with the API, experiment with use cases, build extensions, whatnot. Continuously grab community input, incorporate it in the product, and get new feedback. All that has started from the earliest stages by ScottGu, then Phil Haack. The while team seam to be everywhere, from mailing lists to ALT.NET conferences, getting consumer input and building around it.
The outcome is that they can focus on solving consumer problems, and the progress of improvements is amazing. It got to the point that I have no problem at all with using ASP.NET MVC, even though I’m an active member in MonoRail. Personally I prefer MonoRail, but I really see ASP.NET MVC as a viable option, and recommend it as a possible solution.
Opposite examples Take the Entity Framework. I’ve been hearing about this beast from 2005. However being able to get the feel of it took way too long. Meanwhile it appear that a lot of stuff has been introduced into it, that might not even be interesting to consumers, while rendering fixing the consumers’ problems more difficult.
And as for trusting your own tools - I’ve heard once that Visual Source Safe was never used internally for development within Microsoft. I also don’t really believe that there is a single public major website under Microsoft’s umbrella that uses SqlDataSource, heavily customised GridView components and other widely demo-ed Webforms stuff.
Confidence Technologies like Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, not to mention the more experimental stuff like IronXYZ and F#, find their way into community review, and even to internal production use. Microsoft are voting confidence in these products, so do I.
ALT.Microsoft So as far for the notorious Vote of No Confidence in EF, I never have joined it as it simply make no sense imo. It simply does not interest me enough to even vote. They way I see it, EF belongs next to WebForms, while MVC/IronXYZ/F#/etc are legitimate ALT.NET
Cuz ALT.NET is not about opposing anyone. Definitely not MS - hey these guys brought us the CLR and BCL.
It’s also not about being the freedom guerilla fighters fighting the evil Corporate. Not at all.
I think that ALT.NET is a great idea, just like XP (Extreeme Programming), and like XP it has a bad name, as it implies ‘niche’, ‘alternative’, ‘scary’, ‘elitist’, ‘vane’.
It’s not.
It’s about good tools, built to help make us developers work better, and have more fun during. Parts of the DevDiv are as ALT.NET as it gets.
Alt.NET Israel conf - registration is open
It’s on "First in first served" basis, and there is a limited capacity, so go ahead and register at the conference page:
You’d need an openid identity in order to register. If you don’t have one, that’s be a great opportunity to get yourself one. it’s free, and it’s gaining more and more popularity as a SSO mechanism for the web. I’m using myopenid.com - signing up was simple, easy and fast.
IMPORTANT:
Please do not register, just because of the free admission if you don’t think that you’d come. Otherwise you’d be taking a place of someone else’s.
If you do register and later on find out that you won’t be able to take part, please contact us organisers so we’d be able to add people from the waiting list.
if you blog - go ahead and spread the word.
if you can - tag it with "alt-net-israel" and/or "altnetconf" so it would propagate to the aggregators.
cya there
Announcing ALT.NET Israel - the community driven (un)conference
I’m really pleased to announce that there is going to be an Alt.Net conference in Israel, namely Alt.Net.Israel.
So what is Alt.Net? If you haven’t heard of Alt.Net yet, read David Laribee’s post to better understand the term - What’s ALT.NET
Details: The conference will be held on Thursday 7th and Friday 8st August 2008, at the SQLink offices in Ramat Gan, and is being organised by Roy Osherove, Oren Eini (a.k.a Ayende), and myself.
Thursday 7th, at 18:30-20:30: planning meeting, following a walk to a nearby pub or coffee shop to socialise.
Friday 8th, at 09:30-16:30: sessions.
We have chosen a summer Friday and a super accessible location on purpose, to give the religious people a chance to attend and still make it on time home for Sabbath.
Agenda: That is really up to the people who attend. We will be following an open spaces format, similar to the other alt.net conferences in the UK, USA and Canada, where the agenda is decided by the conference participants. Anyone can lead sessions on particular topics of interest, participate as an attendee or just hang around and chat with interesting people.
Please note that registration is not open yet! I will blog more when we have information on this, hopefully it will open shortly. I can say that the conference will be free of charge.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. I’m really looking forward to this, should be a great event!
A big thank you to our sponsors:
See you there :)
P.S, also a big thankyou to Ben Hall, of the alt.net UK organisers, which is partly responsible for my enthusiasm for alt.net conferences, and I’ve also used his previous announcement as a template for this one …