So we had a bit of a mix up last night. We thought we had a speaker arranged, but the speaker was arranged for next month. Opps. So we improvised and had the first ever NetDug Open Spaces meeting with about 30 people. We had pizza and when for about 2 hours.
I think it went reasonably well. I saw a lot fewer blank stares than usual, that is good, and quite a few people got involved. After a few rounds with the attendees, here is the list of topics we settled on:
- Inversion of Control (selling it to upper management, and what is it)
- ORMs (NHibernate, SubSonic, Linq to SQL, oh my!)
- Behavior Driven Design
- Web Service Security
Obviously you cannot cover all of those topics in depth, but sometimes you don’t need to. In the course of the discussion we also talked about Test Driven Development, Architecture, when to use singletons and when NOT to, and Active Record Pattern vs Repository Pattern.
Take away’s from the meeting:
- There is a lot of interest in IoC libraries out there, but not much practical experience.
- We also need to have a session on how to get started with NHibernate.
Actually, it was amazing to me how much interest there was in “advanced” topics and best practices. Hopefully that will continue.
Hey Chris, it does seem like it went pretty well. I was checked out part of the time (checking in some test code for a side project) but I enjoyed the IOC discussion.
First Open Spaces meeting I’d ever seen; it’d be interesting to try having brownbags at work in a scheduled meeting room, but with no scheduled/planned topic, using that format. I’m wondering what people in this building want to talk about but never get the chance to talk about, because no one wants to make the PowerPoint slides or get the code samples ready…
For more of this, visit our next quarterly Elegant Code Open Spaces event. Heck, yes, Wade!