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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.

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 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!

David Giard will be presenting “An Introduction To Object Oriented Programming” at the Findlay Area .Net User Group August 25 in Findlay, OH. For more information visit http://fanug.org

If you are in the area please come out to join us!

An Introduction to Object Oriented Programming

Object Oriented Programming is a paradigm that focuses on the objects in a software system and the messages passed between those objects. In this presentation, I will describe the fundamental concepts important to understanding objects; show the basics of object oriented programming; and illustrate these concepts using Visual C# code.

David Giard has been developing solutions using Microsoft technologies since 1993. In the past, he has spoken at Microsoft ArcReady, Microsoft DevCares and many conferences and user groups around the Midwest. He is a recovering certification addict and holds an MCTS, MCSD, MCSE, MCDBA, a BS, an MBA, and numerous other letters of the alphabet. You can read his latest thoughts and watch his show - Technology And Friends - at www.DavidGiard.com. He lives in Michigan with his two teenage sons.

Time:
5:30-7:30 PM on the last Tuesday of the month
Location:
Marathon Findlay Offices
539 S. Main St., Findlay, OH - Room 106M
Cost:
Meeting is Free.  Software, books and other door prizes at drawing held at end of meeting.

Pizza and pop served at 5:30. 

Codestock was a rocking fun time this year. Major props have to go out to Michael C. Neel (@vinull) for once again busting his ass and putting together an impressive conference.  Of course let’s not forget the amazing community work that Alan Stevens (@alanstevens) does with the open spaces.

This year was a great conference and it was cool to see it expand to a two day event. This I noticed seems to be a trend. Last year the conference / event schedule was saturated with what seemed like events almost every weekend the last year. This year there are far less but the ones that are there have expanded to be much larger.  My personal view is that this is a better deal. It’s tiring and hard on developers with families to haul off every other weekend for events.

Thursday I jumped in the car and hit the road from Ohio to Tennessee. Out of all the long drives I have ever done the I75 drive to Knoxville has to be my favorite. The scenery, once you get out of Ohio, is very interesting and I love mountain diving. It can be a bit scary at times whipping around the curves and racing down the road at unsafe driving speeds, yet so thrilling and fun!

I rolled into Knoxville around 5:30pm and right to the lovely and lushes La Quinta.  All jokes aside the La Quinta is actually a very nice hotel. They do a very good job keeping the place clean and it’s dirt cheap. With my AAA discount I snagged a double room for 53/night + tax. Extra special thanks to Dean Weber (@deanweber)  for splitting the room with me. Made the whole trip even more affordable and fun having a roomie!

The unofficial pre-conf party was at the Mellow Mushroom, a pizza place. We managed to take over the entire patio area and then some. It was an awesome time and it great to finally meet many of the #TwitterTribe in person for once.

Friday morning came around very quickly and we headed over to the conference. I figured we were getting there early but the line was already a mile long. My personal opinion would be to get it broken into multiple lines sorted by name to help keep the flow moving a bit better.

Alan Stevens ran the opening keynote, if you could call it that, since it was really what had to be the largest open spaces opening circle I had every seen!

I attended mostly open spaces but also did a few eyes front presentations. Honestly I’m not really here to comment on them. A recap for those that weren’t there is pointless and for those that were know what happened.

Closing the day out we were all privileged to get to be part of a live taping of DeepFriedBytes Podcast by Chris Woodruff (@cwoodruff) and Keith Elder (@keithelder). Special guests include three microsofties; Josh Holmes (@joshholmes), Brian H. Prince (@brianhprince) and Jeff Blankenburg (@jblankenburg).

After that a group of us hit a local Mexican join for some solid food and then we rolled over to the Official Codestock Social. Ok time to get on my soapbox here. Once again I was very disappointed in many of the core community and speakers. I know it’s a free country and people can do what they want but for all the talk about community I found it very disappointing to see that a group of people decided to have what account to a private pool party at the hotel instead of attending the Social.

The social was a great time and I wish more had attended. I had many great conversations and enjoyed playing video games and board games with many people.

Saturday came way to early once again and I crawled out of bed and drug my butt to the conference. Josh Holmes gave an inspiring talk about “The Lost Art of Simplicity.” This is a must see if you get a chance to see him give it.

I attend a bunch of open spaces and eyes front sessions. The only really exciting one was the introduction to Ruby and Koans by Leon Gersing (@fallenrogue). I had an amazing time learning ruby and getting to hang with a few of the Tribe. Best session bar none!!

Finally the day wrapped with the closing and prize giveaway. The big prize this year was the uber-mega Visual Studio Team System Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscription given by Wallace B. McClure (@wbm). This is every developers dream prize and at a retail price of roughly $10,000.00 it’s also way out of the league of most developers. Unfortunately I did not win. Next year I’m going to have to bribe or blackmail someone to get it!

Then a large group of us headed out for dinner and the unofficial after party at Alan Stevens place.  The food was fair, I was pretty disappointed in the quality of the prime rib I had but the time spent with my friends more than made up for it.

The after party was helluva good time! I won’t go into great details but there was a bonfire and lots of people having awesome conversations. I drank a few beers and smoked 3 cigars that night. A Rocky Patel Vintage 92, Gran Habano 3 Siglos and a Drew Estate Tabak Especial Cafe Con Leche.

The party winded down around 2:00am and I headed back to the hotel for a few hours of sleep until I would have to drive back to Ohio.

The drive home was bittersweet. It was nice to get back home to my love and to sleep in my own bed, yet I was saddened to once again leave my developer family.

I cannot stress how important it is to be able to spend time with all of the wonderful people I have come to meet and befriend. Working in a job day to day can be great but many times the coworkers you have to deal with are very much what have been termed the 5:01 developer that has no passion or care to attend events of just hang out and talk tech. They turn off at 5:01 and go home for the night. There is very little passion or enthusiasm for their trade and they see it as nothing more than a job to earn a paycheck.

Being able to spend time with the Tribe as we call ourselves is needed to help me recharge and re-energize my passion for the craft.

I look forward to seeing you all at the next event. Thanks for reading!

Just a little reminder that Codestock is coming up shortly folks! It will be June 26-27, 2009 in Knoxville, TN.

CodeStock is about Community. For Developers, by Developers (with love for SysAdmins and DBAs too!). Last year an idea started at CodeStock to mix Open Spaces within a traditional conference. This year we’re going to crank things up to 11 and rip off the knob - and you’re being drafted to help!

• Keynote by Microsoft RIA Architect Evangelist Josh Holmes
• From Developer to Business Owner roundtable with guest Nick Bradbury creator of HomeSite, TopStyle, and FeedDemon
• 50+ break out sessions + Open Spaces (self-organizing sessions)
• Grand Prize: VSTS 2008 Team Suite with MSDN Premium
• Virtual sessions with Jeffery Richter and John Robbins

Space is limited so register today at CodeStock.org