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Month: January 2012

Codemash 2012, Is there anything else like it?

I bet there is not.  If there is, I want to see it.

Seriously, Codemash is a “down-home/local” conference that isn’t “down-home” or “local” and one that brings the likes of Scott Hanselman (@shanselman),  and other big names in the industry, just to give an hour long talk, not to mention the excellent key notes that are always good.  When I got home and started to read the twitter feeds on #codemash, the general consensus was HUGS!!!  I may be wrong here, but the twitter feed from #build did not give the aura of love.  Codemash is also a small world.  Not only did I run into a few buddies from college that I haven’t seen in years (Bruce Hubbard. @brucehubbard and Wes Grollmus, @wesg92), I found out that Jon Kruger (@jonkruger) is married to one of my wife’s friends that I shared a locker with for 4 years in high school.  You walk out of this conference thinking that what was once just twitter handles are now actual friends.

With all of that touchy feely stuff aside, the content is just downright amazing.  Codemash has “the law of two feet”, which translates to: If you aren’t learning or contributing….leave without recourse.  Well, not once the whole 3 days did I feel that way.

If you been to the conference but haven’t attended the precompiler, please make an effort to do so.  I actually think it is the most important day of the week.  As I have said before in previous Codemash posts, the people are what make Codemash special, and the precompiler is probably the best place to do that in a semi-professional setting (as opposed to room parties, of course).

/* if you want to read about how I spent my time at this event

This Codemash was slightly different for me this year.  As my work is embarking on some technology that isn’t as familiar to me as what I have been doing for the past 10 years in .NET.  I tried to go sessions where I wasn’t very familiar with the subject matter.  That, of course, is the whole premise of this conference, but I have always spent most of my time strengthening the things I knew, instead of exploring things I didn’t.  This year I spend the morning session of the precompiler with Leon Gersing  (@rubybuddha) and Scott Walker (@pragma_tech) as they walked us through what was essentially 53 examples of JavaScript gotchas.  They were, in fact, proponents of the language, but wanted to point out some of the nuances that would otherwise not seem to make sense to someone like me, and that was extremely helpful.  The afternoon session I spent with Clark Sell (@csell5) and Brandon Satrum (@BrandonSatrom) while they walked us through where HTML5 is, and gave us a wealth of labs and experiments to try stuff on our own.  This class was great, my only complaint was that it should have been a full day, there was so much good content and the 2 speakers spent quite a bit of time putting together these labs.  Four hours just wasn’t enough.  I explained this to Clark and he agreed, but I would have come on Tuesday if I knew I could have had that much hands on stuff to go through.

Thursday was equally as informative.  I actually had so many sessions I wanted to see, it was HARD to narrow down which to go to.  On the contrary, for the morning session, I knew I was going to see Scott Hanselman’s (@shanselman) talk on the Web Stack of Love.  There is a reason this guy is a sought after speaker, and there is a reason there is standing room only in his talks.  He is that good.  Next, Rich Dudley (@rj_dudley) showed us about building applications in Windows 8 with HTML.  He was very energetic (which I am told is baseline) and fun and informative.   Glenn Block’s (@glock) talk on Node.js and Azure was next, and man, Node is pretty cool.  The talk seemed to be more about Node than Azure, which was fine with me given that the likelihood of my current work involving Azure is small, but cool nonetheless.  The rest of the day I learned about CoffeeScript from Brandon Satrum (@BrandonSatrom) and Roslyn from Dustin Campbell (@dcampbell) .  CoffeeScript was very intriguing to me as someone who doesn’t write a lot of JavaScript.  The language seemed to make more sense to me, and it guards you from some of the gotchas that I learned about on Wednesday.  While CoffeeScript is not a replacement for learning JavaScript, I can see it as a valuable tool in doing so.  The Roslyn stuff was also pretty awesome.  It left me wondering if something like this will improve such things as Resharper, or make it harder for them to provide value if a lot of what they do is baked in to Visual Studio…

Friday.  The bittersweet last day of Codemash.  The day you have a “hung over eagerness”to continue from what you learned earlier in the week.  Thankfully, the content was still just as good as ever, and I actually had up to 4 classes per session that I wanted to attend.  Phil Japiske (@skimedic) gave a talk using JustMock that I think I can apply to my current work, and that is always exciting.  Next I attended another Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) talk on Dealing with Information Overload.  This was basically a class on lessons learned by Scott on managing your life and your work.  The biggest takeaway from this sessions was “if there is something in your life that isnt improving it or making you money, delete it”.  He talked about how a large amount of developers have trouble sleeping (myself included) and that is because we are doing a for loop in our heads of the things we didn’t get done and the things we want to do.  The second takeaway was that (paraphrasing here) “every developer should have a blog, I don’t care how mundane the content”.  Every year Codemash reignites my writing in this blog, and this year was no different.  Lastly, I attended a class from Bill Wagner (@billwagner) entitled “C# Stunt Coding”.   Caching the expression tree of a reflection call and compiling it on the fly for subsequent calls to eliminate the performance hit!  Oh my!

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I just cant say enough good things about this event.  It is truly that good.  My company sent 10 developers this year, and to quote Michael Letterle (@mletterle) in reference to his company sending just as many: “#thatishowyoudoit”.   I’m already counting down to next year.  Big thanks to the organizers and attendees that make it awesome.

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