It’s been too long since we’ve had an open source .NET conference. Since monospace/monkeyspace imploded, we’ve been left with just Xamarin’s Evolve. And while I love Xamarin, and Evolve is glorious, it’s just not the same thing as the free-wheeling brain fest of an OS conference. Only at an open source conference do I get to see free thinkers unabashedly demo’ing their latest library or idea without having to bend it to a corporate initiative. It’s liberating and exciting!

Thankfully, FRINGE is bringing back open source .NET conferences - and it’s doing a hell of a job of it. I love everything about it. I love their web site and the use of pink. I love writing it in all caps.  I love the people organizing it. I love the people who are going. I love the city it’s being held in. I want to retire and just attend FRINGE professionally for the rest of my life.

So go get a ticket and get your bum over to Portland - and bring your best ideas.

Sad about FRINGE Even More Excited for FRINGE

On a personal note, I’m a bit sad that I won’t get to speak at FRINGE.

 I will be speaking! Since deciding to become an active member of the .NET community (introverts such as myself make such decisions solemnly) I have gotten to speak at the mono and monkeyspaces every year.

It’s a tiring thing being a speaker. You have to do an enormous amount of preparation at home, then, at the conference, you can’t relax until your presentation is over. All that stress, and then your work disappears into the ether 45 mins after you begin (you pray, gods willing, that someone, somehow, remembers a word of what you said - that all that effort was not for nought).

But I love to present. I love to lecture. My friends will often yell, “stop lecturing me!” Little do they know that I’m just practicing for conferences - that I’m annoying them for the greater good of the .NET community.

Part of this comes from my philosophy of knowledge: You haven’t learned something until you can code it (explain it to a computer), and you don’t understand it until you can teach it (explain it to a human). Presenting gives me an excuse to intensely study - to interrogate and hopefully verify - my own knowledge and then communicate the findings. It’s like crack for someone like me.

Withdrawing from an addiction is a painful process.

Personal reflection is in order I suppose. I suppose the topic I proposed “using functional programming to create user interfaces” - while an incredibly timely and sexy topic (note libraries like React, note how kahn academy is writing their apps) in my mind, just didn’t resonate with the organizers. Perhaps my description sucked. Perhaps the other talks are more timely and more thought provoking. Or it could simply be I’m overthinking things and I should get back to work. Probably that last one.

I’m an idiot.

See you at FRINGE!