In my previous post about Developer conference in Bergen I said some not so nice things about the .Net community in Bergen (also called criticism). After today's meeting I take it all back. Everybody that showed up today proved me wrong. On previous meetings we were satisfied if 20 people showed up. Actually 20 people is/was our goal for average attendance for 2008. So what happened today? 43 people showed up to see Erik Leivestad and Thomas Eyde talk about Agile Project Management and Test Driven Development! For a time there I was worried that we didn't have seats for everybody. I really hope that this is the new norm at NNUG Bergen and not just a onetime incident.

We also did a quick survey before we started the meeting. We asked how many project managers and how many developers was in the audience. To my surprise almost everybody was developers. I was thinking that because of the Agile PM talk we might have attracted a different type of crowd than we usually do, but that was not the case.

The second question was how many was here for the first time. About 50% of the crowd raised their hand. This was not a surprise for me since I checked the statistics the day before, but it's nice to get it confirmed :)

The last question was how many will come to the next meeting, and that was depressing. The response was 3-4 hands at best. I guess you where thinking: "let’s have this meeting first and see how it goes" :)

A big thank you to everybody that showed up today and a special thanks to Erik and Thomas for spending their spare time to educate us about agile processes and tools. It's really awarding to see a big crowd showing up when you've spent a lot of time (without getting paid) getting speakers and subjects that you hope people will like and find interesting. Finally I hope to see you on our next meeting the 27th of February. Until then, happy coding!

Somehow I got reminded about an old support incident I had in the first company I did development for. On a regular basis we sent out disks with text files containing data that our system should import into its database. Embedded with the disk was an explanation of how to import the files into our system. Here's how I remember it:

1. Open the command windows (DOS) (Somehow all our customers knew how to do this)
2. Write A: followed by Enter (Return)
3. Write install.bat followed by Enter (Return)
   

One day I got a call from one of our customers:

Customer:	"The instructions you sent me do not work"
Me:	"Ok, what seems to be the problem?"
Customer:	"The install.bat thing does not work. None of the data is getting imported into our system."
Me:	"Do you get any error messages?"
Customer:	"I don't know. I just followed your instructions."
Me:	"Could you walk me trough it on the phone?"
Customer:	"Sure"
Me:	"Have you opened the DOS window"
Customer:	"Yes"
Me:	"Then enter A: followed by Enter. Does it now say A:\ in your window?"
Customer:	"No. It says NOT READY READING DRIVE A:"
Me:	"Have you put the disk in?"
Customer:	"No, your note didn't say anything about that!"

We've now added NNUG as a group to LinkedIn so you can get a nice NNUG logo on your LinkedIn profile. If you're a member of NNUG and have a LinkedIn profile, go to http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/51477/4686F07FF0B2 to add NNUG to your profile. For now the approval is manual, so there might be a short delay before it gets displayed on your profile. On my profile it looks like this:



Thanks to Lars Wilhelmsen for setting this up.