Tag Archives: .Net

CodeMash … and Football!

Have I mentioned CodeMash? LOL! Even my conversations IRL these days seem to find their way to CodeMash. So no one will fall over when I mention CodeMash and football in the same blog post, right? Well, at least not my real life friends …

Yeah, we were being daring, putting together developers of all languages and platforms to learn from one another. Back when the conference planning started (ahem, discussions last spring!), we didn’t really THINK about football. But … it’s happened. One of the longest standing rivalries in college football has escalated to be The Game. Not just for the Big Ten Championship, but likely for rights to go to the National Championship. And it is coincidentally occurring on the same year that we’re putting together Michigan and Ohio programmers for CodeMash.

In this family, my 1 year old son signaled “touchdown” before he said “Mommy” (and I was OK with that). And my 3 year old daughter yells, “GO, GO, GO! RUN!”, and “NO!” at all of the appropriate times. Yup, we’re huge football fans. MICHIGAN football fans.

Sadly, even though Josh is an Ann Arborite, he isn’t really a football fan. So, on the organizing committee for CodeMash, it’s me against the Ohio guys (many of whom are in Columbus). They’ve been polite, even as they were apologetic in their hopes that Michigan would lose to Notre Dame in the early season, setting up a OSU/Notre Dame national championship. But alas, we know what happened (reminder to the Fighting Irish: it was 47-21 MEECHIGAN!). I didn’t gloat. I just quietly sat in meetings throughout the year, hoping that both teams would go UNDEFEATED into the UM/OSU matchup.

So on November 18, I’ll be cheering on Chad Henne, Mike Hart, and Steve Breaston (no trash-talking on my buddy Breaston, Kirk Herbstreit!), and all of the other guys including the AWESOME defensive line. And then the following Tuesday, I’ll go back to our weekly CodeMash organizing meeting with “the Ohio guys”.

So come one, come all to CodeMash! We’ve got Java and Python and .NET … and even some people from both Michigan and Ohio State!

CodeMash – I'll be there! 

Announcing CodeMash 2007

Ohio … where you need to be January 18-19

What? January in Ohio?! That’s always the first reaction. But … once I tell them what’s going on (and that it’s at an indoor water park), the tune changes to, “Really? Cool!”.

I’ve been involved with the planning of CodeMash, a 2-day conference for developers, to be held in Sandusky, Ohio January 18-19. 2007. It’s a conference for developers of all flavors: Java, .NET, Python, PHP, Perl … you name it! We’ll have some Ruby on Rails and some TurboGears, some Oracle and MySQL. The goal is to all get together and learn from one another. We all benefit from advances in other languages and platforms.

We’ve scheduled some really cool keynotes. Bruce Eckel is going to talk about issues of design in software development, from a philosophical standpoint. Neal Ford is planning a talk about the evolving programming paradigm. Scott Guthrie will also be doing a keynote.

We’re accepting abstracts right now, and conference registration will be open really soon (you can reserve a spot now, though!). The pricing is phenomenal … early bird price of $99 for the 2 day conference, if you stay at the Kalahari Resort (conference hotel, discounted room rate of $88/night). The regular price for registration (after Nov 30) is $149.

I think it’s going to be an amazing event.

CodeMash – I'll be there!

Code Mash Conference Page

Energy Builds After Conference

Energized and Ready to Get Back to Work!

It’s amazing what a few days at a conference can do! It’s been a while since I’ve been at a conference. The past few years have seen me “stuck” in town with family responsibilities. It was really great to get away, and I really forgot how energizing getting out among different people can be.

A lot of the topics discussed at Bruce Eckel’s “Programming the New Web” conference weren’t really things that I use in my daily life. I don’t use ColdFusion or PhP or Python. I mainly live in a .NET/Java world. But I love to hear and talk about technology and solutions as much as the next guy, and so even the topics that weren’t directly related to what I do offered insight and grabbed my attention. The advantage of only having one session at a time is that I felt free to attend these talks, and of course, I learned a lot there too!

And, one thing that pretty much everyone agreed on was that innovations like Ruby on Rails has really driven updates in Java tools!

We even had a session on Java vs. .NET programming that turned into an entirely non-technical talk, about how Microsoft has built up a support structure that really helps business like mine, while Sun has pretty much ignored the Java community. Upon my return, I was amused to see a (totally coincidental) email soliciting Java Champions, which might help to achieve at least part of what Microsoft does with their Most Valuable Programmer and Regional Director designations. I’m looking forward to our local Java user group meeting (next week), and I’m hoping that I can become more involved with that.

Next entry will be on tools!