Perth Alt.Net - RavenDb

Last I did a "talk" on RavenDb at the Perth Alt.Net beers. I must say I was really stoked at the turn out. Lots of banter, comments, queries, theories and general discussion. I sincerely hope that everyone else enjoyed it as much as I did. I also felt that last night was moving closer to what I hope these events should be. These shouldn't be one-way dialogue. IMO the presenter is there to just start discussion and then it becomes a group affair, there should be lots of interjecting, lots of crowd participation. Last night there certainly was that and best of all it stay on track, we didn’t veer off into off-topic subjects (much) and I think the night was better for it.

I really do feel lucky to be in the company of some very smart people and i want to thank everyone for letting me bleat on and not give me too much grief for being woefully underprepared.

However I put it out there that the people who are comfortable enough to ask the hard questions (and there were a few), please take the reins, we want to hear from you! I’m a strong believe that you can learn as much about some from the questions they ask as the questions they answer and there were some gems last night.
Please contact Mike (@wolfbyte) or myself if you are thinking you may be interesting is starting a discussion, or even if you want to hear about stuff especially if it is edgy and possibly not suitable for the standard M$ .Net community of practice stream (Mitch wheat is the contact for that if you do have M$ specific stuff however). Any feedback is good. The hardest thing for organisers is trying to figure out what the crowd wants and as we nerds are not the most vocal people, making it even harder to run nerd events.

A further incentive is we now have sponsorship. If you get up and present you get swag, swag you want. I worked out since I have been back in Perth I have received several thousand bucks worth of cool stuff from presenting or attending various .Net events. It’s worthwhile getting involved!

Garry Stewart is up next time (in about 2 weeks) talking about light wieght IDEs, specifically VIm and letting go of our addiction that is Visual Studio.

One big note I also want to make. Take the talks for what they are. The whole under current of Alt.Net is "options". We need to be aware there are options. We are not saying you must throw away SQL and use RavenDB exclusively or Vi will replace Studio, we just want people to open their minds. If last nights talk got you thinking about how you could get you python web stck talking to cassandra, sweet, most of what we are talking about is concepts, if there is a tool involved, its just there because it facilitates a different way of thinking. Thats all.

See you next time :)