Bring a Friend (Why Have An Elegant Code Open Spaces Session?)

May 27th, 2008

Last week Scott announced a Elegant Code Open Spaces Session. But why are we doing this? Obviously when answering this question I am speaking for myself and not necessarily the rest of the Elegant Coders…although who could possibly disagree with the constructed and reasonable argument that follows!?

There are basically two reasons for me to personally participate in various community events:

  1. The selfish answer is that I want to make myself better.
  2. The unselfish answer is that I want to make other people better too.

The second one of these is hard. One thing that was re-emphasized for me during Seattle was that the biggest challenge that any community faces is converting the unbelievers. Obviously most of the people who turn up for ALT.NET events have bought into the ideas (I am not going to go down the rat hole of defining what those ideas are). But how do we increase the number of people who are aware of and hopefully buy into some of the ALT.NET dogma?

The problem was well illustrated in the Are Auto Mocking Containers (AMC) Evil session in Seattle . The amount of concepts that need to be understood and pain that must have been experienced to even reach the point when an AMC comes into play is enormous. So how do you take your stereotypical Mort (I am not using this term in derogatory way) and at least make them aware that there might be another way to do things?

When we were discussing this problem over lunch we came up with the idea of the Open Spaces session. It sounds kinda lame but the idea for each Elegant Coder is to “bring a friend” who might be open to some new ideas and at it’s core that’s what this event is all about. It’s going to be a lot of fun…

Jason Grundy

  • Evan

    I dislike your usage of the terms “unbeliever” and “dogma”. Of the things I practice, all of them have logical and rational reasons behind them (though sometimes the explaination is counterintuitive and/or complicated at first). They also aren’t universal for all situations. A person with a dogmatic approach to development is an accident waiting to happen.

    ALT.NET isn’t a church for people to come, be converted, and worship. It’s merely a community of individuals with an interest in becoming better at what they do (with a solid foundation in what that entails).

    I find the dogmatic view of the ALT.NET community to be actively harmful of its intention to promote good development practices, and this post tends to validate that harmful viewpoint (even if it was unintentional).

  • http://elegantcode.com Jason

    I agree that “dogma” is the wrong word because it suggests some type of authoritative doctrine and ALT.NET is definitely not about that…quite the opposite in fact. I’m going to blame the English language for getting me into trouble here. Sometimes I get into a flow when writing and one word on a particular theme (here religion) can lead to me subconsciously choosing others. But that’s one of the reasons that I blog. It’s the selfish side of me that wants to get better (see original post).

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