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Yet another technology conference season is upon us!

There a many great events being planned and some are already announced.

Here is a short list of events and links to their websites. Save this link, as I hear of new events I’ll make sure to update this blog post to add them.  Just a reminder that most of these events are in the “Heartland District” as defined by Microsoft which includes Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee but I’ll add events in other neighboring states as well. Don’t mistake me, this isn’t just a list of Microsoft events either! Any technology event in the area that I hear about I will list. If you know of any drop me a line and I’ll get it added!

February 2010

Grand Rapids Code Retreat - Grand Rapids, MI - February 6th, 2010 (Free)

March 2010

Roanoke Code Camp - Roanoke, VA - March 13th, 2010 (Free)

Southern Maryland Give Camp - St. Mary’s City, MD - March 19th - 21st, 2010 (Free)

Lansing Give Camp - Lansing, MI - March 26th - 28th, 2010 (Free)

April 2010

Pittsburgh Code Retreat - Pittsburgh, PA - April 3rd, 2010 (Free)

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise - Philadelphia, PA - April 8th - 9th, 2010 ($325.00)

Philadelphia Code Retreat - Philadelphia, PA - April 10th, 2010 (Free)

Kalamazoo X Conference - Kalamazoo, MI - April 10th, 2010 ($35.00 Professional / $15.00 Student)

Great Lakes Ruby Bash - Lansing, MI - April 17th, 2010 (????)

Grand Rapids Silverlight 4 Firestarter - Grand Rapids, MI - April 17th, 2010 (Free)

Pittsburgh Code Camp - Pittsburgh, PA - April 17th, 2010 (Free)

May 2010

Ann Arbor Day of .Net - Ann Arbor, MI - May 1st, 2010 ($10.00)

Chicago Code Camp - Chicago, IL - May 1st, 2010 (Free)

Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition - Columbus, OH - May 7th, 2010 ($25.00)

IndyTechFest - Indianapolis, IN - May 22nd, 2010 (Free)

June 2010

CodeStock - Knoxville, TN - June 25th - 26th, 2010 ($55.00)

July 2010

Ann Arbor Give Camp - Ann Arbor, MI - July 16th - 18th, 2010 (Free)

Cleveland Give Camp - Cleveland, OH, July 16th - 18th, 2010 (Free)

August 2010

DevLink - Nashville, TN - August 5th - 7th, 2010 ($100.00)

September 2010

Ohio Linux Fest - Columbus, OH - September 10th - 12th, 2010 (Free)

October 2010

erubycon - Columbus, OH - October 1st - 3rd, 2010 (~$300.00)

November 2010

NO EVENTS

I can’t stress enough how much fun these events are. Not only can you learn a lot of things but you get a chance to hang out and socialize with some of the top developers in the area. I encourage all developers to try to attend at least one local event. You will not regret it!

Another CodeStock has gone and passed and what an event it was! They finally moved from The Pellissippi State Community College out in the boonies of Knoxville, TN to The University of Tennessee Conference Center in downtown Knoxville. Even better the “official” hotel of the event was the Hilton right across the street. Major props to the event organizers for setting this up so well.

Thursday

I had a nice 7 hour drive from Bowling Green, Ohio to Knoxville and by nice I mean a pain in the butt. I ran into major traffic slowdowns several times and hit two torrential downpours that had the entire highway driving 20-25mph through the mountains.

Luckily I managed to make it safely and got checked into the hotel. The hotel was very nice! Much better than the Laquinta I’ve stayed in the past 2 years!
I ended up meeting up with a large group and we went over to the Downtown Grill and Brewery for some good eats and drinks and then back to the hotel to hang and enjoy a few cigars.

Friday

Awake at the crack of 7:30am I was showered and across the street to the UT Conference Center.

I started out my day in Jeff Barnes (@jeff_barnes) session “Building Reliable and Scalable Systems with NServiceBus”.  This was a great intro to service buses and similar technology for scaling systems. I learned a lot from Jeff’s presentation and could see a few potential uses for this system at my own company if we were to re-engineer some of the core systems.

Sessions 2 was Robert Cain’s (@arcanecode) “The Decoder Ring for Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence with SQL Server”. Thank you so much Robert! You were amazing! I’ve been trying to get my head around the basics of data warehouses for some time now and for some reason I just couldn’t “get it” until you explained it. I have a few book suggestions from him as well so I need to pick those up to get moving forward on this for my company as well.

Next I hit the early lunch session and wandered over to the open spaces.

Sidenote, I love the way they did lunches at CodeStock. Instead of the usual set lunchtime that everyone eats at they just had lunch available for two sessions so that you could grab food between sessions and eat in a session. I liked that much better as it lets early or late eaters choose when they want to eat and it doesn’t waste precious learning time. I call it genius!

So at open spaces I ended up getting into a very long discussion about changes in society and the devaluation of information, free market, piracy, etc.  Holy cow was that a great conversation. This is one of the reasons I love events like this. So many smart people in one little area to share and disseminate knowledge, ideas and thoughts.
After that discussion I spend a good majority of the time speaking with a few people about my beliefs that our industry needs to be professionalized like engineers, doctors and lawyers. This is a highly volatile area of thought so I won’t go into the discussion now but it was fun to share my thoughts with other people.

The last session of the day I caught was Layla Driscoll (@LaylaDriscoll), .Net CLR Program Manager at Microsoft, on “.Net from within: CLR 4.0 and beyond”. It ended up being a very good presentation on some of the new 4.0 features and even a chance to ask questions about how Microsoft adds features. Very informative and cool to get some inside scoop on how MS works.

The day finally ended and we all hiked over to the Bijou Theater for the keynote. I wasn’t so sure I liked the idea of the keynote being 3 blocks away but it worked out so no complaints.

Rachel Appel (@RachelAppel), Developer Evangelist for Microsoft, gave the keynote on the topic of community. She brought up many people to talk about their experiences in the technology community. It was a fun keynote and best of all they did the prize giveaway there. Again, great idea staff! It’s nice not to have to wait after the event is over for an hour of prize giveaways since many people want to get on the road home.

Again, I headed back to the hotel for a few drinks at the bar and cigars. I was feeling very happy by the end of the night!

Saturday

Once again I was awake and at the event ready to go.

Session 1 was by Michael Eaton (@mjeaton) on “Going Independent 101: Lessons learned from a decade of independence”. This was a top notch session and it was very nice of Michael to share so many good tips and suggestions for how to move into the path of consultant.

I had planned to see Jennifer Marsman’s (@jennifermarsman) presentation on Win7 multitouch next but I ended up in Open spaces again chatting with people on many different topics.

Lunch time I sat in on Michael Kimsal’s (@mgkimsal) session “Getting start with Twilio”. This was probably the most useful session I sat in on. I do a lot of telephony work at my job and Twilio could end up being the perfect fit replacement for managing our own phone systems. I’m very happy that Michael did this presentation so I could be exposed to this technology.

After that session I sat around OpenSpaces for a while talking about jQuery, Sharepoint, sharing work horror stories and finally bailing out early to watch the USA soccer game.

The only thing left to do was attend the world renowned Alan Steven‘s (@alanstevens) Post-Stock party at his place. It’s so nice of Alan and his wife to open up their house to dozens of nerds to enjoy a fun night. There were drinks flowing aplenty and plenty of folks smoking pipes and cigars outside. We even had a bonfire to sit around while several people took turns playing guitars and singing songs.

Sunday

Getting up was a killer after staying up so late at Alan’s place but I managed to get checked out by 10:00am and on the road home to Ohio. Traffic flowed better but I still managed to get caught in two separate torrential downpours again that slowed traffic to a crawl. Man what is it about the mountains and rain?

I finally pulled into my home around 6pm and was glad to be back with my family and my own bed.

Now all I can think about is my next big adventure… DevLink!

The Ann Arbor Day of .Net 2010 registration is now open.

There will be a small nominal fee of $10.00 this year to help cover expenses. Lets be honest her folks, for the great amount of information you be getting and the amazing opportunities to network with other professionals it’s worth the small fee.

It will be held Saturday, May 1st, 2010 in Ann Arbor, MI at Washtenaw Community College again.

Hurry up and go get registered before it’s too late!

Mark your calendar folks Kalamazoo X has been announced for April 10th, 2010 and registration is now open at http://KalamazooX.eventbrite.com

What is the X Conference?

The Kalamazoo X Conference is a one-day software development conference hosted in beautiful Southwest Michigan. While there are many great technical conferences in the region, their focus tends toward new technologies and programming languages. The Kalamazoo X Conference intends to uniquely complement those conferences by enabling attendees to boost their process, design, and communication skills in the following areas:

•Human interaction, including social, personal, and career development.
•Interface and graphic design
•Development processes and best practices
•Requirements analysis, architecture, design, and modeling

I attended this event last year and it was great. It’s run as a single track rapid fire series of talks that focuses on the so called “soft skills”, all that non-technical junk you need to know to do your job!

Please check it out and attend if you can. It will be well worth it.

Another CodeMash Conference has come and gone and now it’s time to reflect on the event.

Well first I guess I should let you know what CodeMash is, if you never heard of it before. What better way to explain it than just copying from the offical website! “CodeMash is a unique event that will educate developers on current practices, methodologies and technology trends in variety of platforms and development languages such as Java, .NET, Ruby and PHP. Held January 13-15, 2010, at the lush Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, Ohio, attendees will be able to attend a world-class technical conference amid Ohio’s largest indoor waterpark.”

Wednesday was the optional PreCompiler that you had to pay extra to attend. The precompiler is made up of two long sessions; morning and afternoon .

I only attended the morning session “Bootstrapping your Bussiness” presented by Nate Kohari and James Avery. They spent the time talking about starting your own technology business using the examples of the businesses that both of them have started. This was very inspiring and motivating presentation. I learned a lot and just enjoyed hearing some of the inside story of how they found their on inspiration and energy to make the move to being their own bosses.

The Thursday morning keynote was present by Mary Poppendieck on “Five Habits of Successful Lean Development”. The 5 habits are; Purpose, Passion, Persistence, Pride and Profit.  This was a great presentation and I wish I could get Mary to come speak to everyone at my company. It might just inspire a few folks there to try a different way of working. One that focuses on making the company as a whole run better. Which isn’t that what everyone wants a company to do?

As far as the sessions go, I only attended 4 this year.

“What Makes Ruby Different” presented by Joe O’Brien, Mark Peabody and Leon Gersing. This was an interesting session where the presenters provided sample code in Java, C# and Ruby on how to perform different coding functions to compare and contrast the languages. One thing though, I feel I need to call out that while the presenters were trying to be objective it was very clear to me that they showed a favored bias toward Ruby. I understand that’s the purpose of the talk to promote Ruby but there was one example for file I/O that really bothered me. In both the Java and C# examples they wrote 10-15 lines of code to open a file and print the contents to the screen that included a lot of exception handling for catching common file IO errors (file not found, no read permissions, etc) but the Ruby example had none of this and was only 5-6 lines. It was implied by this that somehow ruby doesn’t need this but Java / C# does. Which I disagree and call shenanigans on. Ruby will error our just the same if there are IO issues and you need to add error detection code too to handle these issues. That aside I enjoyed the side by side examples and learned a lot!

Next was “An Introduction to MongoDB” presented by Mike Dirolf. MongoDB is one of these new “no-SQL” database engines that are built around document and key-value pair storage instead of being a full relational database like mySQL or MS-SQL. Mike did a great job of explaining what MongoDB was, where it would be useful and some examples of how to use it. I’ll admit being a SQL man I’ve looked down on these new data storage engines as something out there that’s kind of second rate but Mike did a very good job of making me see the benefits of them and I could see myself perhaps in the future making use of them where a project would benefit from it.

“Refactoring the Programmer” presented by Joe O’Brian was one of my favorite sessions. This was another one of those “soft skills” sessions that I find myself attending more and more these days.  Joe did a great job of providing real world examples of how to improve yourself and your work life. He spoke about the idea of learning to invest in yourself and not expecting your boss to help you grow. He also brought up a good point about finding mentors to turn to, to guide and help you grow. This was a great session and I’m glad I was able to see it considering it was a packed standing room only crowd to hear this talk.

“Oh Crap! I Forgot (or Never Learned) C!” presented by Chris Adamson was the last session I checked out. I actually learned C in college but the title just screamed “watch me Alan” so I had to stop by and listen in to see what Chris had to say.  It was a wonderful walk down memory lane and very informative considering the growing iPhone development world which uses the Objective-C language.

The attendee party Thursday night was a ton of fun. People were having great conversations about many technology topics from .net to ruby to cell phones. The drinks were flowing and hors d’oeuvres and deserters were found everywhere to keep us full and happy. Several Wiis were setup at different vendor booth and people were playing Mario and Star Wars games. Surprisingly I don’t think a single vendor had a music games setup this year. I think maybe the Rock Band / Guitar Hero fad has officially been passed. It’s about darn time too! You can only stand hearing the same 3-4 songs played over and over for days on end before you go homicidal!

There was a game room where people were planning board games and a poker tourney was going full steam.

The big surprise was that the fine folks at EdgeCase brought in the band “Enter the Haggis” to play! Enter the Haggis is a Celtic rock band from Toronto, Canada. They rocked the house and were a fun way to end the day!

One of my favorite things about CodeMash is the fact that it’s very family friendly. The conference provides plenty of activities for children with their “KidsMash” room full of games and toys and water park! Even if you don’t have children you can bring along your girlfriend or wife with the promise of 2-3 days of sitting around a heated water park in the middle of winter. It wouldn’t be right not to talk about the amazing world class water park at the Kalahari Resort, I mean really that’s half the reason we come to CodeMash.

The Kalahari has a great water park full of fun activities. There’s a bunch of different water slides, a huge wave pool, several giant hot tubs (inside and outside) and the totally cool Wave Rider indoor surfing ride.

I know as computer people we many times don’t feel comfortable in large public groups but I encourage everyone I meet at the event to just go for it. It’s a lot of fun to splash and play. If nothing else just check out one of the inside/outside hot tubs. There is nothing cooler, no pun intended, that sitting it a cauldron of hot bubbling water while being outside in the snow. Try it and you’ll love it!

Make sure to take some time and check out all the CodeMash v2.0.1.0 photos that I took.

And finally mega props must be given to Jim Holmes (@JimHolmes), Jason Follas (@jfollas), Brian H. Prince (@brianhprince), Jason Gilmore (@wjgilmore) and many others for doing a great job putting on such a wonderful event!

Thanks! I can’t wait till next year!