Alt.Net UK

I had the opportunity to attend the Alt.Net UK conference the other weekend. All in all, I am definitely glad i took the time.

Ian Cooper, Alan Dean and Ben Hall deserve a lot of credit for putting in the effort of organizing and for both RedGate and Conchango for backing the event. They did an outstanding job providing a hassle free environment for those participating.

The best thing about this conference was its focus on discussing better ways to do things, sharing experiences and NOT a lot on Microsoft bashing.

Sessions ranged from conversations on REST architectures to BDD to how to unit test a database. I could attempt to give summaries of each i attending but rather than do that i will just point you to here. This was another great initiative of this conference. Using a wiki and asking participants to help populate information in one place so a more broad audience can benefit and reference is a great idea.

While I am in no way an expert on the subject, I attempted to lead a session on Evolutionary Database Design and how to use tools such as dbdeploy.net to simplify following that style. But I was happy to see the session follow the open spaces concept, and shift to what those attending wanted to discuss more specifically. Some very interesting conversations around how a one click deployment type upgrading of a database could work in a non networked/very locked down environment. It resulted in a "not so sure how that'll work" answer but definitely presented a good challenge to debate. The other nugget i took away was the interesting idea of treating a stored procedures as an immutable object.

While the open spaces concept struggled a little bit, I still think it is the right way to host this type of conference. It was clear that it was a new concept to many and that led to a somewhat passive participation with a few strong personalities dominating the conversations. I expect the next one will benefit a lot from the learnings of the first.

If i happen to be lucky enough to attend the next one, i plan to.
And if you have the opportunity to attend a similar event, I highly recommend it.

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