When I do my presentation on “productivity”, one of the things that I always mention is “brown bag meetings”. The concept has been introduced to me by good buddy Lynn Evans, and we’ve been doing it at the company (less often than I’d like) for some time now. I’ve also got some of our clients into doing it, and they always give me feedback saying they’re glad I got them into it, and they’ve been holding weekly meetings every since.

The idea is simple: once a week, people bring their “brown bag lunch” to the conference room, and we share tips and tricks. Unfortunately, there are developers who are either:

• The only developer in the company, or
• Working for a company that wouldn’t support such effort, or
• Working as an independent developer

So who’d they have “brown bag meetings” with?

In order to cater for that, we’re starting a “virtual” brown bag meeting. The meetings are going to be hosted by the Virtual ALT.NET website through LiveMeeting (one of the most important aspects of ALT.NET is “continuous improvement”, and that’s what the brown bag meeting is all about!).

We’ll start doing it every Thursday, from noon to 1pm (Central Time). Depending on how things go, maybe different groups can held the meeting at different times so to account for different time zones.

In order for this to work, it’s vital that more than one person bring something to share. Of course, if we end up having a large number of people, it may not be possible for everybody to share, but we’ll figure something out if that turns out to be the case.

So all you have to do is to log on to the meeting by clicking here, and then watch people giving tips away while you eat your lunch, and between one bite or another, you contribute with some tip yourself! :)

Here are some ideas of things you can bring in as something to share with others:

• A shortcut in Visual Studio, Windows, whatever, that you’ve learned or have been using for a while;
• A tool (free or commercial) that you can’t live without it;
• A tool that you may have run across, find it to be interesting, but are not sure about it yet. Maybe somebody else already uses the tool and can jump in;
• An article, book, or blog posts you’ve read and want to talk about. It may be something you’ve read and couldn’t quite understand; maybe somebody else can shed a light on it for you;
• Some command, language feature, workaround, design pattern, etc., anything you’ve learned or run across and could share with the others;
• Something that you’ve found a way to implement but still think that there’s got to be a better way to do it; maybe somebody else can tell you what the other way is;

So that should allow us to get started. Join us, share, learn, get to know other people. It’s a win-win, isn’t it?  :)

When: every Thursday, from noon to 1pm (Central Time)
Where: that’d be wherever you are. Just connect to http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet

See you online!