Code Renaissance - "There's more to Great Software than just the Code"

Like many of you I have a teeth grinding, nails on the chalkboard, trip to the dentist reaction to the term marketing that conjures up memories of late night infomercials, telemarketers, and internet/twitter/email spammers. Corporately you may also encounter the term used in the following context: "Marketing says they need [impossible changes] to [something you're responsible for] by [impossible deadline] because of [illogical reasoning/self-promoting corporate politics]".

In fact in most contexts the term Marketing is about as well received as a charbroiled cat at a PETA luncheon.

Believe it or not though, while it can be used for evil, marketing isn't inherently evil. At its heart marketing is simply an attempt to take something that you're selling and make it appear favorable. Yes you could be selling a product but thinking more broadly you could also be selling an idea or even selling yourself (think about the last time you went on an interview).

Evil marketing says: We have a awful product/service/idea that we want you to think is great! Often the product was designed primarily to be sellable, but not necessarily useful or reliable.

Good marketing stems from the product itself. It only occurs when you've worked hard to create an awesome, usable product that fills a need and, having done that, seek to get the message out to the people that it will help.

To simplify it further, marketing is the sum of the messages that you are putting out there about something you want others to care about, whether it be your company, your product, your team, or yourself. It is critical to be aware of the messages you are putting out, how consistent they are and the perception that they are creating.

How good your product/blog/software looks sends a message. How it's presented sends another. How useful it is, while critical, can be buried behind the all the other messages that are being sent. Perception is often more important than reality and perception is exactly what marketing seeks to influence.

Companies are marketing their products; Managers are marketing their teams; Team members are marketing their skills and their usefulness to the company. Good marketing takes something worthwhile and aligns perception with reality; poor marketing fails to do so. Evil marketing takes something worthless and attempts to skew perceptions to make it seem worthwhile.

I attended the yesterdays Virtual Alt.Net(VAN) Brown Bag Lunch online and was surprised by the variety of content. The floor was opened up for anyone in attendance to give a quick presentation of things they're working on or wanted to share and several different developers stepped up. From programming to tools to application etc it was quality content all around and well worth the time.

It's rare to find something this exceptional and pleasantly different out there. I'm sure if the meetings got large enough they'd need to have people schedule ahead of time but for the moment it's an extremely interesting, and rather unique format; I really hope it scales as they grow.

If I'd know ahead of time that they would be opening up the floor I might have had something quick prepared... I may have a go at it next time.

I hope you'll all make it a priority to make at least one meeting in the next month. Whether you come to speak or just to listen I think that you'll be pleased.

Every Wednesday 1PM EST Virtual Alt.Net Mettings (via LiveMeeting) are here.

I mentioned to someone at work that I'd be attending a Virtual Alt.Net (VAN) Meeting online and their response was (no kidding): "Alt.Net? Isn't that a cult?".

Now you may have heard rumors flying about those crazy Alt.Net guys being some sort of X-Files, Lone Gun Men sitting on the sidewalk outside of Starbucks typing on a laptop with one hand and holding up cardboard sign with the other declaring the coming Apocalypse , but I assure you it isn't so (at least not based on tonight's meeting).

Ryan Svihla (@rssvihla) gave an excellent presentation for VAN (Virtual Alt.Net) on the Castle Project tonight. His coverage of IoC and Dependency Injection were solid and the discussion of Castle was interesting. Castle it isn't quite mainstream and to tell the truth, all the code was a bit much for me to absorb in one session, but it was clear from what I saw that these types of frameworks for managing dependencies are the way things need to be headed.

Anyway, the meeting went off without a hitch using Microsoft LiveMeeting (just like the Linked In Dot Net User Group - LIDNUG). Unlike LIDNUG The Virtual Alt.net guys have meetings scheduled very consistently and conveniently for an American crowd; if you're in the continental US they should be Wednesdays sometime after work and Thursdays around Lunch time. There are also a few meetings scheduled for the international crowd.

It seems like they're just getting everything off the ground and they're doing a great job so far but I would like to offer a little feed back. Their site www.virtualaltnet.com doesn't come up first in a google search. Also, when I got there I couldn't find the LiveMeeting link (I might have missed it but I didn't see it there). Thankfully they have members active on twitter and I found the link there with a quick search. It's a minor thing, and one to be expected with a newly forming group, but the sooner they fix it the better their numbers will be.

Anyway, it was a great meeting. I plan on attending tomorrow's brown-bagger from work if I can.

You should be able to attend for tomorrows and all future Virtual Alt.Net Mettings (LiveMeeting) here.

Thanks again guys.