Last night was the first Bitslinger’s event. For those of you not following a Bitslinger event is just an informal gathering of people interested in learning from each other via pairing and sharing ideas. We had about seven people show up, which I thought was a pretty good showing for the type of event it was and the fact that it was the first one. One attendee brought a nHibernate related issue they had been looking at for work and several of the attendees walked through that issue, writing some code spikes to see if they could reach a conclusion on the best approach to take.

Joe Fiorini had tweeted about looking for tools that could help a group of people find a date and time that worked for everyone. I came across this site while looking for such a tool. ScheduleOnce: http://www.scheduleonce.com/ There are two ways this site can help you out: You can add all the attendee’s timezones and find out the best time to meet. The organizer selects the meeting time. Useful for organizers who want to know the best time on a given day to meet with their global team/family/etc.

During one of the early CinARC meetings, as well as during an open space at the devLINK conference, it was brought up that in the .NET community we often point to people as experts while not even seeing a line of their code. In some other software communities you may not be taken seriously until you’ve contributed to an open source project or posted your own code publicly so that people can see you know what you’re talking about.