Here’s a thing: I would have gleefully attended Brad’s session, laptop in tow, had it been ‘Evolutionary development for the web with ASP.NET and TDD’. The MVC focus turned it from practical and relevant at my company and for my team into something no less futuristic (and impractical for direct use) than a session on Clojure. I realize you can’t focus on the past forever, but there are a lot of us out here in less than ideal working environments, and ignoring that is a sure fire way to limit attendance to the most elite developers. I suspect your goals are larger than that. How about puling the rest of us up?

I’m not sure it reflects the state of the community so much as the state of the conference.

I think a lot of programmers (myself included) have started staying away from the big conferences because it is a large investment with little payoff for us.

Nonetheless, I think XPUniverse 2011 is the best idea I’ve heard all year. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help.

Thanks,
Adam

What worries me about it, is the split I notice in the Agile community lately. Software Craftsmanship raised the bar of professional software development by re-visiting the nearly ten year-old statements from the Agile manifesto. Meanwhile there is momentum towards tree-hugging as expressed recently at the XP2010 conference in Trondheim.

It’s important to have soft-skills and to have warm and cozy feelings (slight reference to Lee Copeland here) about the work we do, but it’s more important to know what we’re doing. XPUniverse2011 is definitely a step forward in the right direction to me, though I hope that the selection process will be similar to the one Jason Gorman uses for the SC2010 conference in Bletchley Park, London.

You got my full support.

Another reason i am interested is that if it is a smaller conference it might be more affordable for someone like me who will not be expensed by my current company nor are in the position to present a session and thus get in for free/discounted.