Codemash Day 1- Up and Running
Codemash officially started today. I must say I have been very impressed by just about everything so far. The venue (Kalahari) is excellent. Jason Follas, a good friend of mine (and president of NWNUG) said it's like being on the west coast in terms of the facility. I would have to agree! I'd been to Kalahari some time ago but never got a chance to go in the conference area. Great choice, codemash organizers!
We kicked off today with a keynote by Neal Ford. The conference room was chocked full, and I think everyone that attended got something out of it. I particularly enjoyed the DSL (Domain Specific Language) stuff he was talking about, and comparing it to what we do day-to-day with various programming languages. I must say the "spirit" here at codemash is unique and this talk kind of typified it. Typically I go to a conference where it is platform specific- which is nice, but sometimes it seems like I am hearing the same thing all the time. Here, many of the attendees and presenters are from all kinds of backgrounds. So far I've made it a point to go to sessions that are language/platform neutral. I went to a turbogears presentation, briefly hopped in on a MySql talk, and even picked up on some python along the way. It's amazing to see the similarities in concepts, and that we are all solving problems in similar (and sometimes different) ways. I think it is a great learning process. I had a conversation with someone about technology who was more of an open source advocate, and didn't even realize it until about 30 minutes after we started talking about the virtues of Ajax.
So anyway... Codemash is great, and I really hope the community can continue great conferences like this. Hopefully the word will get out and we'll be able to do this again soon.
Oh, and BTW, if you are at codemash and reading this, be sure to blog your own entry. Apparently, Josh Holmes (Microsoft DPE) will be shaving his head if we get enough blogs! Now if that isn't motivation....
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