Last weekend I helped organize the Houston ALT.NET Open Space conference.  About 100 people came to share, learn, and grow as developers in the .NET (and surrounding) communities.

We had the pleasure of having Doc List facilitate our gathering.  It has been said before that Doc is the "adult supervision" to keep the developers in line.  This is certainly true, as it is really easy for a bunch of geeks to get off topic and go play Rock Band all day.  I really feel that he helped us be self-organized, rather than self-propelled chaos.  Thanks, Doc!

The topics were very technical, which I like.  I enjoy process oriented talks, but I'm more drawn to the technical ones.  There was a healthy dose of F# & functional programming, Ruby (IronRuby, Rake), NHibernate (with FluentNHibernate & NHibernate.Linq), Deployment automation, BDD, DDDD & Command Query separation, and more.  There were more talks proposed in this conference than any I have attended previously.  I think that is one metric for success in a conference like this.

I specifically noticed one session, labeled "Should I even be programming?"  This guy had the courage to stand up in front of 100 people and admit that he wasn't sure if this was the career for him.  I truly wish I had gone to this session, as I heard it was really good.  I hope that he was given the type of advice he needed.  One thing I was sure to mention is that we are all out there, on blogs, twitter, or simply around for lunch to continue the conversation.  We don't have to be stuck in our job, isolated from the rest of the developer community.

The space that we had was graciously donated by Microsoft.  It turned out to be a fantastic space for this type of event.  Most rooms had projectors, it was all within one small area, so hallway conversations were very abundant.  I have to send out a great thanks to J Sawyer, who gave me support to put this on.

Throughout the event, especially at the closing, many people thanked me directly, or thanked me "and the other organizers."  Unfortunately, I neglected to mention their names!  I did have help, folks!

Here they are:

From left to right:  Jonathan Birkholz, Claudio Lassala, Doc List, JP Hamilton, Peter Seale, and myself.  I really appreciate all of your help!

I mentioned that the number of topics was a good metric for success.  The other major one, in my opinion, was the fact that the conference seemed to spark a certain fire for some of the attendees.  Some of them asked for another conference next month!  Others asked how they could join in with the monthly geek dinners.  There's been some serious talk about organizing some Code Dojos in the area.  All of these things make me feel proud to have been a part in this event.  I hope that the passion spreads.

Our wiki has some of the notes from the event.  You can also check out the videos, and the photos, taken by my wife (our beautiful official photographer) and by Doc (who is less beautiful, but still takes good pictures).  The videos are of webcam quality, and some higher quality ones will be posted at some point.  I'll link to all of this on the official conference website whenever I get around to it.

As for me, I'm taking a break from stuff for a while.  I've been really quiet on this blog, mostly because of my book, but also life has become incredibly busy.  I plan on spending some more time at night with the family, catching up on my never-ending reading list, and doing some programming for fun.  Most of you know that I have twins on the way, and a little less than one month to prepare!

Thanks ALT.NET Houston!  See you next year!