I attended Seattle Code Camp 2008 in Redmond this weekend and it was a fantastic experience! I will definitely be back next year.
This is certainly not the largest Code Camp out there, with only 125 attendees at the peak over the weekend, and the after party was a simple affair in a room on the MSFT campus. It wasn’t the frilly stuff that mattered, it was the content and who was giving it.
It was not uncommon for the presenters to be either the guy who wrote the book on the topic, or the guy who actually made it! We were a stones throw from the MSFT campus and one example of the proximity effect was the fact that in Steve Borg’s talk on Ruby, John Lam was sitting in the audience. No pressure, Steve.
In fact, I found myself at dinner talking to someone about Enterprise Library and it turns out I was talking to Chris Tavares. You know, that Chris. The lead developer for EntLib in P&P and the guy who write Unity? Look for an Elegant Code Cast soon, folks.
And thanks to Chuck Sterling for the good tips on the VM configuration for the laptop. I am going to try one better and go for a SSD external. We’ll see.
My Sessions
I did 3 talks in all, one of them rather spontaneous. I think they went great, and I had a great time talking to people. Everyone seemed to enjoy the sessions. This link goes to a ZIP with the materials from all of my sessions.
- TDD with WCF Services
This is talk based on a HOL I wrote for the Connected Systems Division at MSFT a few months ago. We spent an inordinate amount of time looking at mocking as a tool and got a little sidetracked on it. That was fine with me, because it was what the people in the room wanted.
- Agile Estimation Techniques
In this workshop, we basically learned and practiced planning poker. I was convinced no one would even be there. I was up against Ted Neward, after all. Turns out, I had almost 30 people and received a lot of compliments on the workshop. People really seemed to get a lot out of it.
- Silverlight 2 for Developers Who Don’t Do Web Apps So Good and Want to Do Other Stuff Good, Too.
I did this talk on Silverlight after learning Saturday night that the real Silverlight experts weren’t going to show on Sunday. So, I went home and hit refresh on my Silverlight demos and did the session at 9:00 AM Sunday. People seemed to enjoy it.
David, thanks for speaker and sharing your knowledge with the rest of us. I attended your WCF and agile talks and they were both excellent. You had a bit of a tough crowd for the TDD talk, since only a few of us had even used mocking frameworks before. That is the difficulty of the mixed crowd, but the basic concepts were certainly there. I wasn’t sure you were even going to get to the service 🙂 since the client discussion took most of the time.
I see you weren’t joking about planning poker on the homefront!