My CodeMash Recap
The advantage of writing my recap of CodeMash a little later is that I can start by pointing at one everyone else has written. To begin, Jim Holmes shows the strain of organizing CodeMash. After a break, he discusses what happened at CodeMash.
As is usual, Scott Hanselman chooses just the right phrases to describe CodeMash. He gave a fantastic keynote, but what was more impressive was that he spent the entire conference just meeting with people and discussing everything with everyone. He even interviewed Dustin Campbell on F# for Hanselminutes. Dustin gave a great talk on F#. I didn't attend his talk, but I did get a preview of it in the speaker room before hand. He does a great job of presenting a new concept, and getting everyone to feel comfortable.
Sara Ford came from Redmond, and had the guts to show up wearing an LSU sweatshirt. She did open spaces talks on Visual Studio tip of the day and CodePlex. Sara is also one of those people that put a very human face on a very large company. If you spend any time with her, you can tell she enjoys what she builds, and has blast every day she creates something new.
Dave Donaldson was only there one day, talking about RESTful Web Services. Of course, I had to get him to show his OSU tattoo to Sara.
I really like Jay's recap. He discusses what he learned, how the communities built around different technologies differ, and what we can learn from each other. I missed his Castle Project talk, but I hope to hear more about the project during lightning talks at our office.
Patrick Steele wrote about his experience teaching about Monorail, and using it. (You'll not a thread here that Jay discussed the Castle Project, of which Monorail is one component.)
Well, what about my experience? Well, I had two talks. One was on building an IQueryProvider implementation. That didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. The more I did research on that topic, the more it was clear that there is just too much infrastructure to build in order to make a worthwhile implementation. That always makes a talk difficult. You can't build it there; you can only discuss code you pre-built. The danger in that is that you give people the impression that something is easier than it is. I hoped to avoid that without completely scaring them away from building an IQueryProvider, if it's the right thing to do. (It often isn't, but sometimes it can be worthwhile.) That's a blog post in itself, so I'll leave that for another day.
My second talk, "Real World C# 3.0" was much more fun. I was the first morning session after the keynote. I showed up with a deck containing 10 slides (including the title, agenda, about me, and questions). This was a 70 minute conversation where I spent the whole time building code and discussing the advantages and disadvantages of different solutions you can build for different problems. I hope everyone there enjoyed that style of talk. I got lots of great questions, so it was clear that most of the room was thinking and engaged.
The rest of the time, I was trying to learn new things. I know more about Python than I did last Wednesday (but I'm by no means proficient with it). I know a bit more about Silverlight.
My favorite thing about CodeMash is seeing first hand just how much technical brainpower we have in this region, in many different technologies. I learn a lot by talking to other folks in our area. I learn what they are working on, what the challenges are, and how they are trying to overcome those challenges. Regardless of the tools they are using, we are trying to solve similar problems, and we can learn from each other.
I'm already looking forward to next year.