#2782

Thoughts from ALT.NET Seattle

Spent most of the weekend at ALT.NET Seattle listening to lots of different ideas. I didn’t take a lot of notes, the motto of the conference was “practice, don’t preach”. In the same vein in the name of being able to listen more I took fewer notes.

I do have some notes from the keynote by James Shore. He gave a great talk and covered some things near and dead to me like the work of Richard Feynman.

None of us really write software, that’s magnetic fields in a chip or disk. We work at a level of abstraction; assembly code or C# are both abstractions.

“Good designs minimize time to create, modify and maintain the software within acceptable performance constraints.”

Spend more time modifying software than creating it, so the design should support that. Assessing the goodness of a design is next to impossible because we cannot predict the downstream changes.

I also went to some great talks on Rx.NET and NoSQL. Two technologies I didn’t know enough about.

Thanks to the organizers and sponsor DigiPen, GitHub and the Cheezburger network.