CodeMash Day 1

Note: I decided not to lug my laptop around to “live blog” today, but will probably try it on Friday.  Also, I’m having connection issues, so I haven’t put any hyperlinks in this post yet.  I will get to that Friday morning.

Well, after a terrible night of sleep, I headed down to the conference center around 8am.  I knew I had an hour to kill, but figured I’d run into some people I knew.  There were a lot of familiar faces from the Dayton-Cinci Code Camp and the Ann Arbor Day of .NET. 

I saw Jim Holmes, who as usual, was running around making sure things were just right.   I have to give the organizers a lot of credit because they’ve done an outstanding job setting this up!  I talked WoW with Jason Follas for a bit and then headed into the morning keynote about “Domain Specific Languages and Their Role in the Evolution of the Programming Paradigm” given by Neal Ford. The talk was very good and I found Neal to be a very engaging speaker.

Unfortunately, I had to leave the keynote a few minutes early to head back to my room for a phone call (more on that in a future post).  The phone call lasted until just after 11.  When I got back to the conference area, I met up with a friend of a friend at the Sogeti booth.  We both headed to the “SOA as a conversation”, which turned out to be a pretty good session.  In the end, it really seemed like all he was saying is “don’t complicate stuff” and that it’s all about interpretations.

Lunch was spent at a table with 5 strangers.   The discussion centered around Java and .NET.  Then it happened….

Bruce Eckel started his afternoon keynote session titled “The World is Dynamic”. Wow.  Not only were his slides really entertaining (pictures from The Burning Man festival), but the overall content was right on the money.  He is a very engaging speaker and I couldn’t help but think, “Damn, he’s really good”. Of course, I do own a couple editions of his “Thinking in Java” book and subscribe to his blog, so I may be a bit biased. 

After the keynote, I caught up with Dan Hounshell at Ben Carey’s session on TDD.  Dan and I discussed the “pushup/situp challenge” a bit after which I filled him in on my still “secret” phone call from the morning.   I can’t wait to sit in on his CI session Friday afternoon.

Ben’s TDD session was good, although since I already do TDD, I can’t help but think I should have sat in another session.  Don’t get me wrong.  Ben was a great speaker and the content was good, but there was nothing new in it.  What I found most interesting is the perspective he has on testing given the field he currently works in (medical).

Final session I attened was the “Networking for Nerds” given by Brian Prince.  While I know a bit about networking, it was a good session that was made even better by Brian’s great sense of humor. 

So, overall, the first day was awesome!  Again, Jim and the other organizers have done an outstanding job.  The speakers have been top-notch, the sessions very informative and I can’t say enough how great the venue is.  Even though my wife and kids couldn’t join me on this trip, they’ve heard enough about this place and have convinced me to bring them for a family weekend.