I know this is late but hey, at least I’m getting it out there :).
CodeMash 2009 was held Jan 7-9 in the frigid and snowy Sandusky Ohio. This was the most incredible experience I’ve had professionally in a very long time. The keynotes were incredible, presentations were great and the people… the people are what makes CodeMash something special. Every night there were great conversations going late into the night (morning) covering every technical topic you can think of.
CodeJam
I was one of a group of five people that hosted the CodeJam precompiler session. It went, well, ok. We had a few technical difficulties which made the day rough though. First, our Vista VM which had the full Silverlight development loaded on it, died on us that morning. Nothing we could do made it boot. Then, when people tried to download SP1 for VS2008, we didn’t have the bandwidth to do so. We did end up with several people up and running and they were willing to pair with others. Overall I do think it was a worthwhile experience and I definitely learned a lot for next time :).
The co-conspirators:
Networking and Communications in Silverlight
On the last day of the conference I presented on Networking and Communication in Silverlight. This was based on a talk I have done several times so I feel that my delivery was solid. In this talk I give an overview of what options there are to get data into your Silverlight application and also how to read various data formats. I didn’t do many of my demos but for this level of talk (intro to loading and consuming data) I feel that presenting a wider array of options and taking more questions is more useful to attendees. From the comments I got afterwards it would seem that I was correct.
Links:
Sessions
I also went to quite a few sessions and learned a lot. Here’s a quick list:
Jesse Liberty on Hyper-Video
Jesse had some technical difficulties getting started (ended up using my laptop) but he did get his point across. I’ll probably be stealing borrowing some of his concepts for future talks/posts.
Thrashing with Mary Poppendieck
If you have ever worked in a shop where you are working on multiple projects concurrently, this was the session to attend. Her talk was most appropriate to enterprise developers but most of the concepts could be applied to nearly any dev shop.
MEF with Drew Robbins
Drew gave us an overview of what MEF is and how it can be used. Personally, this is something I’m going to be watching closely as it matures and can already see many uses for it. And of course there were plenty of jokes about things like the “MEF Lab” (say it out loud).
James Ward on Flex
Embracing the spirit of CodeMash, I went over to learn about Flex. I’m sure you all know I’m a Silverlight developer and will probably never touch Flex but it was nice to learn the capabilities (and similarities to Silverlight) of the platform.
Venkat Subramaniam’s keynote
This was actually the only keynote I was able to attend the entire talk for various reasons. It was awesome. My most memorable quotes from it are “exercise is boring” and “fail-for-less strategy”.
Deep Fried Bytes
Keith Elder and Chris Woodruff had a room staked out on Friday for the purpose of recording episodes of their Deep Fried Bytes podcast. They were gracious enough to listen to me blab on about Silverlight for a while and we should see that coming out in the near future. I’ll link to it when it’s been published.
Keith and Chris make recording a podcast a very natural process, as long as you remember to keep the mic planted in place. It was actually a lot of fun and I can’t wait to record another for whoever wants to hear me talk.
The People
Wow.
This is why to go to CodeMash. The conversations held in the halls, at tables over dinner, in hotel rooms at night and wherever else people gathered were always informative and open. From dinner with Mark and Tom Poppendieck to reviewing CodePlex for Sara Ford to a great gathering of Heartland influencers with the Microsoft evangelism team, there was never a boring moment.
Thank you all for a great conference.
Final Thoughts
I met so many great people and had so many great conversations that there is no way I can list them all here. Just know that if we spoke, I enjoyed it, if we didn’t, I feel like I missed a great opportunity since everyone at the conference had something to offer.
I can’t wait for CodeMash 2.0.1.0
