ChicagoAlt.NET March Meeting Recap

Good meeting, with an Open Session flair. The concept for the evening was for everyone to suggest a topic by writing it on an index card, and everyone got to vote by initialing on the topic they were interested in. The winner was “DDD, is it worth the work” (not the exact text but you get the idea) by Adam Tybor. My suggestions were “Why So Mean?” ripping off on the comment by Scott Hanselman regarding the state of the Alt.NET community, and OODBMS because of my current interest in db4o. The forum was the “Fishbowl” with 4 chairs, and it went very well. We cycled through a lot of ideas and opinions, but it was about 20% of the audience participating and 80% of the audience just listening. I suggested to Sergio that maybe there should be a rule limiting the number of times you can jump onto a hot seat. I don’t think we answered the original question but the conversation was very interesting regarding “What is DDD and why does it matter.” All in all fun session. After a short-break Sergio recommended that we try to hold another session on OODBMS. Since many people had already left for the evening we went with a standard circle format and just kicked around some of the initial opinions of db4o were and what some of the risks/tradeoffs of using an OODBMS versus a RDBMS might be. By then it was already close to 9 PM so we closed the meeting. Overall, we had a pretty good series of heated but friendly discussions, and as always there weren’t any real conclusions drawn but allot of ideas cultivated.