Sarah’s pictures
Dave’s pictures
Jeff’s pictures
Alan’s pictures

Codemash 2009 marked my 1-year anniversary of really being out in the community.  Last March, I wrote a post titled “See what happens when geeks socialize?” that described my evolution in the community.  I have come so much farther and made so many new friends and connections since that post that Codemash 2009 was more of a family reunion for me than anything else.

On Tuesday the 6th, exactly a week after my surgery, I hopped in a car with Jason Farrell and Chris Roland to make the 2 1/2 hour drive to The Kalahari.  My plan was to get there in time for a 7pm meeting with the heartland evangelists (Brian, Jeff and Jennifer) and then hang out with my friends before the Precompiler event on Wednesday.  Since I’m helping to plan a couple major events in the region this year, the influencer meeting was informative, and it was great to see and talk to everyone.  We did have a scare when we found out that the car Leon was driving (passengers were DaveD and Dan) went off the road.  After a few hours in the hospital making sure everyone was ok, they finally arrived at the hotel around midnight.

Chris roomed with me Tuesday night, so after all the festivities, we ended up talking until after 3am.  Good stuff.

Wednesday’s Precompiler event was really cool.  I started out in Joe O’Brien and Jim Weirich’s Ruby session.  I absolutely loved the approach they took.  Essentially, we were given a set of failing unit tests and had to fix them.  After getting through a few of the exercises, I bailed so I could wander around and see what else was going on.  After lunch, I ended up bouncing between the “codejam” session and Leon’s TDD session.   During the TDD session, I ended up working a bit with Mike Wood.  I also jumped into a conversation Leon was having with a couple “students” and the next thing I know, it was just me and the 2 attendees.  Leon later said that he could see I had things under control and he was more than happy to move on and help others.

At one point, a few of us (James, Nate, Mike, Corey and Jay) from ##twittertribe sat down for some hacking on a project.  I’m not sure where the project will go, or if anyone will continue to work on it, but it was cool to sit down and talk through things with those guys.  We hung out later in the bar and talked about all sorts of stuff….basically an extension of what we talk about every day in IRC.

Wednesday night was a bit crazy.  Not only did a lot of my friends show up, but my family also arrived.  While my family got settled in and hit the water park, a bunch of started…umm….consuming adult beverages.  After a few hours hanging out with Alan and  some other friends in Alan’s room, I hit the SRT party and then headed back to Alan’s room to chill out before finally making it back to my suite around 3am.  It was great talking to everyone, including the guy that I credit for starting it all: Dustin.

Thursday saw the start of the event as well as the opening circle for the open spaces event.  I spent most of my time hanging out and talking to friends.  For some reason, I wasn’t as excited about the open spaces as I hoped.  Right after the opening circle, I had breakfast with Alan, Jeff and Sara Ford (name drop!).  Overall, Thursday was about talking to friends and reconnecting.

Thursday night was spent “adult beverage free” at the vendor party and then back in Alan’s room for some excellent conversation and music.  I love listening to both Alan and Corey sing and both did their share.

Friday I sat in a great open space about community.  I was surprised by how many people consider the community to be “user groups”.  I called BS on this pretty quickly and tried to steer the discussion to things other than user groups.  We talked a bit about Give Camps and impromtu discussions via skype/irc and IM.  Skype and IRC have become my lifelines over the past few months.  After that, I attended a lunch with the evangelists, a bunch of community members (my friends) and the head of DP&E in the US (Mark Hindsbo – does he seriously not have a blog?).  It ended up being, IMO, a pretty interesting and productive discussion.

The closing circle for open spaces was….well…..different.  Alan structured things a bit different from DevLink so in order to talk, you had to have the “talking stick”…well, in our case, it was Sarah’s code monkey, but still, you get the point.  The giveaways were cool, but I didn’t win anything, so not much to say about it.

Friday night was once again spent with friends, hanging out and talking about a variety of topics.  I met Chris Smith and had a cool discussion about F# before Corey started playing Neil Young.   At that point, all conversations are done for me.

We finally got home around 3pm on Saturday.

I had a hell of a good time and want to thank all the organizers and sponsors of the event.  Codemash continues to get better with each passing year.  I’ve already got the dates for Codemash 2010 on my calendar!