The second annual Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp was a great success! Mike Wood did a terrific job this year, and we had another great list of speakers this year.
(On a somewhat sideish note, I wish more folks would clue in on the non-.NET speakers we have. Catherine Devlin is a great Python guru, and Jim Weirich gives keynotes at international conferences. Both had tiny, but interested audiences. The folks that missed these two particular speakers missed some significantly accomplished luminaries in their fields. Grips, folks!)
I was a bit disappointed in my two sessions. “Real World SharePoint” was OK, but I had a blue screen of death before I even got to the second slide. I guess I recovered OK, but then my workflow demo from the MOSS SDK wouldn’t load and execute properly. Grrr.
My “Open Source Test Tools” was fair — I shot myself in the foot and didn’t bring the correct VPC image with Fitnesse already configured. I was scrambling around to get things set up prior to the gig, but things just didn’t gel together. That stinks, because I think Fitnesse is a tool that can completely alter how developers work with customers to create tests and specifications. There’s a pretty big “Wow!” factor when you paste in values from a spreadsheet your domain experts filled out, then show how little code it takes to wire those values as tests into your code. A lovely green table appears on the Fitnesse page to prove you’ve done things right.
My pissy whining aside, it was a terrific event. I FINALLY got to see Dustin Campbell speak for a bit. His “Back to Basics” presentation is just incredible — he spent a few minutes on an important topic we don’t think about enough: how to learn well. He hit some really salient points on that such as relaxing to digest what you’ve read, learning a new language every year, and getting involved with community.
Many thanks to all the sponsors I mean contributors we had, and many thanks to the speakers, staff, and attendees who made it such a great event!
1 comment:
Thanks, Jim! You're right, it was an excellent camp... I learned some great stuff (especially from Jim, who's worth watching even if you're utterly uninterested in Ruby - he's just a great speaker).
As for the small audiences for the non-.NET stuff - as far as I know, that's just a function of the local area. We just don't have the large and vigorous community in this area for anything but .NET - probably because most of the local jobs are .NET. Still, I'll keep working to drum up interest - and, in the meantime, it's great that our regional .NET folks are so active and friendly!
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