conferencesStream.Flush(); //Give Camp, CodeStock, devLink Wrap-up
My summer has been what seems like a steady stream of major events in the development
community. It really all began with my election to the board of GLUGnet last
April, which immediately put me as a planner for the first Lansing
Day of .Net, for which I handled the web site and branding. The event, which I blogged
about previously, was held on June 21, 2008, and was a huge success. We will definitely
have the conference again next year, and are already brainstorming ways to make the
event even better.
Three weeks after LDODN, on July 11-13, was Ann
Arbor Give Camp. Give Camp was an event for charity, where area developers volunteered
their weekend to code for charity. The Heartland District truly displayed their selflessness
and passion with their willingness to endure three days of Ninjas-On-Fire coding,
often sacrificing sleep to accomplish deadlines, to help out not-for-profits that
likely would never have the budget for a high-quality, professionally developed web
site. I was also impressed by the event sponsors for their donations and contributions;
Washtenaw Community College provided the venue for no cost, Verio provided free hosting
for each charity's site until 2010, and Microsoft provided to each of the charities
free copies of all of the software needed to support and maintain the new applications.
The planning staff should be commended for this event, too; they went to no end to
enable the development teams, and to meet our every desire. There was plenty of food,
plenty of snacks, plenty of fluids, and plenty of games for when we needed to occasionally
decompress. We requested ice cream; we got ice cream. Someone on my team even requested
a Cherry Coke, and one of the organizers made a midnight run to the local gas station
to pick up a bottle. The event was great, and we had a blast. I will be there next
year, maybe even running a team of my own.
Another four weeks brought CodeStock, August
9, in Knoxville, TN. Dave Redding, The Wife, and I hopped in Dave's Charger and cruised
the nine hours from Brighton, MI to Knoxville on Friday night, arriving at about 3:30am
for the 7:30am registration. Michael Neel and
crew put on a great show. I finally got to see the Joe O'Brian / Amanda Laucher presentation
on DSLs and Brian H. Prince's 'Soft Skillz ' talk. (I highly recommend both.) But
what really made the event were the Open Spaces, organized by Alan
Stevens. We had some enlightening discussions, such as improving User Group participation,
and developing in .Net on a Mac. The after party at Alan's house included a time for
socializing outside of a technical setting, and included a friendly game of Texas
Hold'em. Dennis Burton was the big winner,
and graciously donated his winnings to the Hands On Museum in Ann Arbor, the charity
that Michael Eaton worked on during Give Camp.
In the shortest gap of the summer, I only had to wait two more weeks for devLink,
August 22-23, in Murfreesboro, TN. However, there was no 9 hour drive, as The Wife
and I hitched a ride on the devLink Bus. Organized by Amanda Laucher (and others)--my
employer, Latitude Consulting Group, was also one of the sponsors--we chartered a
coach for the weekend to take some of the local developers down to devLink. The bus
started in Grand Rapids, and made pick-up stops in Lansing, Detroit, Toledo, Columbus,
and Cincinnati. We made some "detours" along the way, and the seats were a little
uncomfortable for sleeping, but we all had a great time; we had some great discussion,
we watched some movies, and Mike Eaton, The Wife, Eric Vogel , and I even played a
few rounds of euchre. We had one minor
glitch on the return trip, as one of the right rear tires blew out at about 1:30am
while traveling at 65mph up I-71, but we even had fun on the 3 1/2 hour delay, as
we took over a Waffle House in Carrollton,
Kentucky, were entertained by "The Great Pork Chop Incident," and a few riders
extended the Open Spaces discussions from the conference.
As for devLink itself, I went to focus on the Open Spaces. Four different Open Space
discussions were on hand for each of the session blocks throughout the two-day conference.
I attended sessions on Developing the Developer Community; on why Comments are Evil;
on How "Should" Changed My Life (a discussion on BDD , and creating effective tests);
on Microsoft, Open Source, and CodePlex; and I facilitated a discussion on Continuous
Integration. I only went to one session throughout the conference: Jeff
Blankenburg's talk on Silverlight. I challenged him to show me a reason to use
Silverlight that didn't include gradients, spinning ghost animations, or anything
else that I have been able to do in Flash since version 4. After his talk, I'm actually
motivated to dig in. Over the years, I have created a few Flash games--nothing too
special, as they were primarily about learning a specific component, like collision
detection--and I plan on starting with converting them to Silverlight. It should give
me a good opportunity to grok the space.
But to me, the best part about this summer isn't the things I have learned, or the
code I've produced, but the relationships and bonds that have formed. I have made
many new connections this summer, and made some great new friendships, and I look
forward to many more. The list is made up of people all smarter than I am, yet I am
treated as an equal. Every time we connect, I learn a lot, professionally and personally.
I have grown a lot over this past year, and I owe every bit of it to them (and to
the kick in the pants from Dennis Burton that pushed me to get involved in the first
place).
Here's to what's next.
Read the complete post at http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CaptainLoadtest/~3/377465763/conferencesStreamFlushGiveCampCodeStockDevLinkWrapup.aspx