Thanks ALT.NET Seattle

The ALT.NET conference wrapped up yesterday afternoon. I wanted to say thanks to all the volunteers, organizers, and sponsors. Thanks to all the other participants who made up the conference. I got to meet a lot of folks who I had only previously known online and I got to be involved in many interesting conversations. I even got to see some snow coming down. It was a very productive conference.

I wanted to give a special thanks to all the Microsoft folks that attended the conference. Those guys get beat up a lot sometimes and I am very impressed by how well they respond to criticism. My hat goes off to those guys for taking the criticism and responding in positive ways. I have a lot of respect for those folks.

Software is hard. Perhaps we will eventually evolve software development into something that’s not hard. Perhaps there will be some completely new radical idea which makes the software development we do today become part of history books. Until then it’s all really about striving to suck less. It seems that whatever gets labeled as the right way of doing things is really just a way to suck less.

So here’s my definition of ALT.NET – People helping each other to suck less.