Or, more accurately, CodeMash 2.0.1.0.
This is the week that software development in many locations in the midwest takes a hiatus so that its developers can beef up on new skills and ultimately provide more benefit to their companies and customers. In its 4th year, CodeMash this year will attract nearly 700 developers to the Kalahari Resort and Indoor Waterpark in Sandusky, OH. The conference kicks off with the "precompiler" sessions (fast-paced interactive tutorials) on Wednesday, and a panel discussion featuring the Java Posse on Wednesday night. Thursday morning, the conference will be in full gear, with morning sessions by industry luminaries such as Joe O'Brien, Jesse Liberty, Jim Weaver, Jim Weirich, James Ward, Ken Sipe, and Jim Wooley. Fortunately, due to "Best of CodeMash" repeat sessions, I can pass up the "Why is Ruby Different" talk during that session in hopes of catching it later and then only have to decide between the JavaFX talk by Jim Weaver and the Flex talk by James Ward. The next session of the day pits the panel discussion "Lessons from the Rails Rumble" against the venerable Andres Almiray in "The Case for Griffon", not to mention Barry Hawkins' "User Stories: Closing the Agile Loop" Hard choices: that's what CodeMash is all about.
Once I survive the struggle from my choices from the morning, and after a lunch keynote by Hank Janssen from Microsoft, I'll have to choose between Joe Nuxoll's "Photoshop for Engineers: Going from PSD to HTML" and Bill Venners' "GetHigher with ScalaTest". Then it's a hard choice between Leon Gershing's "Introduction to Cucumber", Michael Slade's "Techniques for Programming Parallel Solutions", Catherine Devlin's "reStructuredText: Plain Text Gets Superpowers", and Barry Hawkins' "Domain Driven Design". But I'll almost certainly choose Dick Wall's "Funky Java, Objective Scala", as I've been looking forward to this talk and its domain examples in bioinformatics. Fortunately, Joe O'Brien's "Refactoring theProgrammer" has a repeat session! And then there's one more session before dinner, where I'll have to choose between a more advanced Cucumber talk, Chris Adamson's "How do you do that on the iPhone", Andres Alimary's "Testing Java in the Fast Lane", and Carey Payette's "Enterprise Development with Prism". I almost missed that Nick Sieger is talking about "Five Ways to Cure the Java Blues with JRuby" in this timeslot. Again the "Best of CodeMash" repeat sessions come to the rescue and I can choose to see Joe Nuxoll's "Enginering vs. Design" talk later.
Thursday night is always fun at CodeMash. This year, we're adding a concert (Enter the Haggis) to the cocktail party and jam session. Every other year, I've headed out to the water park for a while on Thursday night. Not sure I'll have time to do that this year!
Friday morning, there's no keynote (after that late night, probably a good thing!). We'll start the day with Chris Adamson's "Oh Crap! I Forgot or Never Learned C!", "Going Dynamic with C#" by Bill Wagner, "Being an Evil Genius with F# and .NET", and "Software Design and Testability" with Jeremy Miller. I really enjoy Chris Smith's banter, and so I'll probably head to the F# talk. The next slot has several sessions that I'm really interested in: "RESTful Interfaces to Third Party websites with Python", "Come for the Phone Stay for the Mac" (by author Daniel Steinberg) and James Ward's "Agile Toolchain for Flex".
I'm REALLY REALLY excited about Friday's lunchtime keynote with Andy Hunt. I heard Andy speak at the Philly Emerging Tech conference last year and was thrilled that we were able to get him to come to CodeMash. And by "we", I mean Jason Gilmore.
SRT's Friday vendor session "MobiMash" should be interesting. Jay Wren, Mike Woelmer, Dan Hibbits, and Patrick Steele worked together and independently to provide a mobile solution for CodeMash, incorporating scheduling, session rating, and favorites. And they did it in the 4 major mobile platforms: iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android, and Blackberry. The iPhone and Android apps are available for download in their respective stores. The Blackberry and Windows Mobile apps should be available Real Soon Now. They will discuss the development challenges (and rewards) on the various platforms, using the MobiMash app as a case study. I'm looking forward to it!
After the vendor sessions, I'll have to choose between "Clojure" and "Tools in the Trenches". That's a really hard choice, because I'm both really interested in Clojure and yet also intrigued with Carl Quinn's tools talk. Maybe I can convince Carl to do a lightning talk version at the Java Posse Roundup 2010!