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How I missed Codemash 2014 and still learned something

I have to stop having kids around Codemash time, or rather, roughly 9 months before Codemash time.

Every year I attend I usually write a follow up blog post saying how it rejuvenates my love for the profession each year.  I have missed 2 incarnations of Codemash in its history due to my 2 beautiful daughters being born within months of the event (read: WORTH IT), but this year was a little different.  This time I wasn’t able to attend, but I still had that same fire ignited inside me as the years that I was there.

What happened?  Well two things.

1.  I was able to send a young and talented developer in my place that had never been.

2.  The twitter feed.

Let’s start with #1.  I found that ”prepping” someone that was as excited to go as I was the first time made me feel like I was there again.  Make sure you do this, listen to this speaker he/she is great, participate in an open space, eat lots of bacon (he was paleo, so he liked this part), MEET PEOPLE, etc. etc.  In the week upcoming the event, we talked about it everyday.

Secondly, I probably have never used twitter as much as that week, trying to follow along with the events.  Since I was home with the baby and up a lot, I was spending a lot of time at night working on the website for my new business.  I was challenging myself to step out of my .NET comfort zone and build something solely with HTML and JavaScript (maybe it was Codemash from a distance inspiring me).  The problem that I was having was that my first cut at it had a lot of HTML that I was repeating across pages (navigation bar, header, footer, images, etc.) , and I thought there has to be a better way .  My first thought was MVC to deliver a base layout and render a body dynamically, but that broke my rule of trying something new, so that was out.  In comes the Codemash twitter feed where I was hearing a lot about AngularJS, specifically from my friend that went in my place who had attended a class on it and was tweeting about it.  The lights went on.  That will handle my situation AND be something new (but still kinda comfortable since I was used to the controller concept of MVC!).  A couple of nights of reading and doing and viola!, Holeshot Software was finally out there.  Is it spectacular? not really, but it was something I had been wanting to do, it challenged me, and I succeeded, and my business has a landing page with my contact information.

So, all of the reasons that love Codemash so much were still present, even in its absence, including the interaction with the most important  part, the people (only this time it was strictly via Twitter).

Unless something happens around April again, I will see you all next year!

Published incodemash

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