Twin Cities Code Camp Recap The first Code Camp went
off well, and Jason Bock deserves big props
for setting it up and running the show. The event was well attended. I
heard there were about 200 people there. And there were some great prizes
(including two XBox 360s and two iPod Nanos) from the sponsors.
I went in knowing that it was highly .NET/Microsoft centric, and it was.
Probably 80% of the people there were .NET developers. They even had
Windows laptops! It was amusing to see the "different" (but, really, more
typical) Dells, IBM, Sony, and HP laptops.
What about the content? When I first heard about Code Camp, I wondered how
it would differ from BarCamp.
I
wrote at the time, "The difference from BarCamp seems to be more
structure and a code-only focus." That turned out to be true. BarCamp is
very ad hoc and diverse. Code Camp was more structured and more narrowly
focused. Also, due to the venue, there wasn't a whole lot of room for
social interaction, which is one of the best parts about conference.
Indeed, the BarCamp model is to take the between sessions conversations
and stretch them out to the whole conference.
My take on Code Camp is much like
Jon Dahl's constructive criticism. In the future, I'd like to see more
varied types of presentations and separate tracks for different
technologies. It sucked getting stacked against Charles Nutter's JRuby
demo. It'd be cool if there was room for everyone to socialize at lunch
and during breaks. And some of the rooms didn't have projectors, but
instead everyone got a monitor that mirrored the "instructor's". This was
awkward because everyone is looking down instead of at you. (But having
done some venue-hunting for MinneDemo I know that finding a place that
accommodates all needs is murder).
That said, I think my perspective is a little different as a speaker. We
had our own room for decompressing and socializing. I had a good long talk
with Nathaniel T. Shutta (who I will just call
"Nate" from now on to save typing...), catching up from RailsConf in
Chicago, and finally met erstwhile Ruby developer
Jake Good, who promises he'll come to a Ruby
Users of Minnesota meeting real soon now. After my talk, Jinesh Varia
from Amazon and I talked in more detail about REST versus SOAP. The
speakers were also treated to an after-conference beer at a nearby sports
bar.
But wait, presenters shouldn't have a different, better experience than
attendees, the BarCamper says. Everyone should be a participant!
That's the biggest problem with the presenter/audience format. On the plus
side, the content is more central, which leads to learning more.
The Talks
I attended Jinesh Varia's Amazon Web Services presentation, Cory Smith's
XBoxFriends talk, Nate Schutta's Foundations of Ajax, and of course my own
session on REST. Here's some thoughts on those.
Jinesh Varia, Build Innovative Applications Using Amazon Web Services
I figured I had to go to this because I was talking about Web Services,
too. Jinesh talked primarily about Amazon
S3 and
EC2, which I was
familiar with. However, he really opened my eyes to the possibilities
here. For example, I didn't know that Smug Mug is now hosting all their
photos on S3, and saving a bundle on bandwidth, too. I also learned that
developers can create EC2 machine images (like a VMWare image) that can be
loaded (and unloaded) on new virtual machines on demand...that's pretty
cool.
Cory Smith, XboxFriends...Under The Covers
XBox Friends is a AIM-like application that tells you (from your PC) which
of your XBox buddies are online, and what they're playing. So if they
break out the Gears of War, you can join them. Being neither an XBox owner
nor a .NET developer, this talk didn't hold much for me. I went because
Jake Good told me to go to Cory's talk
instead of his. :)
However, I will say that it was an entertaining talk, and Cory did a great
job of presenting in a PowerPoint-less manner. He showed us real code,
examples from his program, and talked about the challenges of getting XBox
Friends to work (screen scraping, yeck!).
Nate Schutta, Foundations of Ajax
Nate's written a couple of books on Ajax, so I didn't want to miss this
one. It was primarily a compression of the Ajax overview that he gives for
the No Fluff Just Stuff tour, and as such was pretty polished. He gave a
similar presentation at MinneBar in May, but this one had updated content
as the state of Ajax has matured quite a bit since then.
Luke Francl, REST and Its Discontents
My own talk was mixed. I tried to talk about the advantages and
disadvantages of REST versus SOAP, but my understanding of SOAP is
somewhat feeble as I've never used it in a real project. I could have done
a much stronger job explaining why the audience should care about REST.
I also was about 5-10 minutes short on material and didn't have a
class handout sheet, which I like to do, but I didn't devote enough time
to the presentation to finish these things. I think if I gave the talk
again it would be much stronger.
(I know I promised this over a week ago, but hey, it's not like I get paid
for this...)
Posted at 22:56
Permanent Link
JavaScript/CSS tool tips for links I've been thinking of doing something like this for
Central Standard Tech.
This is nice looking
JavaScript/CSS tool tip code for HTML links.
Posted at 13:21
Permanent Link
IBM embraces REST for SOA This is good news for people who want to integrate with IBM's "Enterprise
Service Bus" but would like to use a REST-style architecture.
Greg Flurry, IBM developerWorks:
Interactions with WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere ESB using
Representational State Transfer
Posted at 10:56
Permanent Link