Even though the Continuous Improvement in Software Development Conference may be over, there is still much work being done to distill and distribute the knowledge, value, and magic that happened made KaizenConf 2008 the great success it was. Get the videos As part of that distillation process I, and many others, are currently going through hundreds of Gigabytes of video footage we captured, we’re doing post production work, and eventually we’ll be uploading all of it to the Intar-webs. The primary location to find information on any of the pre-conference workshops or the sessions themselves is...

Looking across blogs, Twitter, and the community in general there has been a lot of discussion around Microsoft's forthcoming Entity Framework. In the midst of the discussion many valid criticisms have been drown out or lost in the noise of the cheerleading, trolling, and marketecture generated by community Gloryhounds, Redmond, and any number of other super-pro-Microsoft groups/identities. Even the alt.net community has been guilty of adding to the noise and confusion. The noise has gotten so loud that the message itself has been lost. Voice your concern But through that noise it looks like a voice...

The recent series of Day of .Net events have been a bit atypical of most other Microsoft related conferences/events - at least historically speaking. The biggest difference I've seen? The decreasing number of "Hurray for the latest golden hammer handed down by our Redmond overlords" sessions. Instead, most sessions have focused on practices, principles, and tooling decidedly not driven nor delivered by Microsoft. They come from a more organic source - a community of developers seeking to continuously improve ourselves and our craft. What community? Some members of the community might gather under the ALT.NET banner,...

This week I was having a conversation with some fellow developers at the ALT.NET Open Spaces conference and an interesting topic came up. We were talking about vast amounts of time, mostly personal time, we spend trying to improve our skills and our craft. We spend time reading and writing blogs, books, mailing list messages, attending and giving talks, contributing to Open Source, and reading and writing code. We spend a huge number of hours in the quest for continuous improvement. Self-teaching is good We all agreed that self-teaching is important and we do it because we...