Preparing for ALT.NET Seattle

While the MVPs descend upon Seattle for the 2008 MVP Summit, I’m getting ready to head to Seattle for the ALT.NET Open Spaces Conference this coming weekend. Many of the people attending the ALT.NET conference are also MVPs, so there are likely to be some tired folks by the end of this week(end).

Based on the experience I had in Austin at the first ALT.NET conference, my company has agreed to send me to Seattle along with a couple of coworkers. A fellow developer and our agile project manager are going along to share in the experience and join the conversation. As an organization, we’ve seen many improvements since converting to agile development (XP-style) and I’m hoping the conference will help identify some new ways to help us grow and educate the rest of the team.

From a project perspective, Dru Sellers and I are trying to wrap up a 0.1 release of MassTransit in time for the event. We’re hoping to be able to share some of what we’ve done with others who are approaching a distributed application architecture, and even more importantly learn from others with similar experience so that we can improve MassTransit and add some new routing and management features. We’re getting there a couple of days early to have some time to pair up and knock out a few last minute tweaks before calling it good.

I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of the friends I met at the first event, as well as making some new friends. I’m excited to have “Doc” facilitating the event, his coordination of the first event was an inspiration at the start of each gathering (regardless of how many beers were consumed the night before).

As the event unfolds, I’ll be adding pictures to a web gallery for the event. Be sure to check it out (or add a subscription to the feed) if you weren’t able to attend in person. I’m sure there will be plenty of tweets as well, along with an RSS feed overload after every gathering.