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!
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