Maggie++

CodeMash has opened up applications for speakers and sponsors for the 2010 event that will take place January 13-15 in Sandusky, Ohio.

CodeMash is the best developer conference in the region and is the only conference that is open to all types of development languages, platforms and processes. They are again having the pre-compiler day of workshops that began this year and was a huge success. This is a day full of in-depth workshops where developers can really dig in and learn something new.

Keep on the lookout for when registration opens as it will surely fill up quickly.

“Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognized. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements. “

Suw Charman-Anderson, a freelance social software consultant in the UK established this day by pledging to blog about  women in technology if at least 1000 people joined her..

“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.”

She points out that research shows that women need female role models and wants us to take part by acknowledging women in technology in our lives.

As a female Software Engineer I have had many women inspire me throughout my career including:

• Colleen Berg
• Anita Borg, founder of Systers
• Carolyn K., founder of Hoagies Gifted
• Suzanne LaChapelle, founder of The Women’s Circuit
• Dianne Marsh
• Jennifer Marsman

I wish to thank them for their inspiration to me and others.

You can follow FindingAda on Twitter and use #ALD09 to find more information today.

maggie++

The Central Ohio Day of .Net is approaching. The organizers are busy choosing speakers and making plans. Submit a talk by March 2 if you have something to share. Be on the look out for registration to open next month and sign up quickly as I’m sure it will fill up fast.

This is an event you will not want to miss. The day is all about community, learning and new ideas. 2008’s event changed my life.  I  had been to numerous code camps in the area and had been a regular attendee of the Cincinnati .Net Users Group.  But I pretty much kept to my self and talked to the few people I knew at the time. 

Here is a summary of the sessions I attended last year along with links to the slide decks for more information. 

I first sat in Joe O’Brien’s talk on Why Ruby and initially felt left out because everyone in the room seemed to know each other, they were twittering and many made big deals (jokingly) about having Macs at a .Net event.  [aside:  I do not understand all of the mac / pc sparring, browser wars and fights over who’s text editor is the best thing since sliced bread.  Lighten up, they are all just tools, it’s the brains that matter ;)]  That faded away as Joe sparked my interest in Ruby.  I had been introduced to Ruby by Jim Weirich several years prior at the Cincinnati Programmers Guild.  At that time it looked like a fun scripting language to easily make tools.  Now Joe was showing how much Ruby had grown and you could build all sorts of things including web applications. He even started his own company to develop Ruby applications and more.

F# It! was presented by Amanda Laucher and James Bender.  Amanda explained twitter so that “I got it” [I signed up later that day and Amanda was the first one I followed]  Then she and James introduced me to functional languages and F#.  I was fascinated and quickly shared their enthusiasm for this ‘new’ way of thinking.

Intro to Boo and DSL by Jay Wren introduced me to domain specific languages.  Intro to WCF by Dan Rigsby and Reliable Messaging in WCF by James Bender provided good insight into what WCF is and how I might use it.  The day ended up with Well, Isn't that Spatial by Jason Follas which introduced location data enhancements to  SQL Server 2008.

Last year at the CODODN is when I was first exposed to Twitter and I became part of the Twitter Tribe.  Since then I have attended similar events in OH, TN, TN, KY, IN and OH.  Each time I expand my learning about software development and my network of fellow developers.  As a result I have greatly expanded the blogs I read, the podcasts I listen to and the books that I read.  I even started my own blog. I have also come out of my shell and go out of my way to talk to and meet other consultants at work and have become more connected to the developers at the local .Net Users Group.

I am anticipating a diverse set of sessions to choose from on April 18th and am looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones.

maggie++

Take a minute and add the CodeMash logo to your twitter picture to let everyone know you will be at CodeMash.  It will give you something to do while you are waiting and if everyone adds it - you will know all of the awesome devs you will meet there next week.

The simplest way I found is to use Paint.NET and add the logo as a layer to your picture.

What are you waiting for?

maggie++

CodeMash  will be in three short weeks. Tomorrow (12/17/2008) is the last day to reserve rooms with the discount rate  at the Kalahari resort.  If you have not registered, what is holding you back?

The session details have been posted and I have tried to plan out which talks I may attend.  This is proving to be very difficult.  If I were Hermione I would be able to wear a Time-Turner to get the most from CodeMash. Hermione Granger is a classmate of Harry Potter.  During the third school year at Hogwarts, Hermione uses a Time-Turner to set time back an hour so she can attend simultaneous classes and maximize her learning.  A Time-Turner is a magical device invented by J. K. Rowling for the book Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

If I were Hermione then I would use this time travel device to attend simultaneous sessions at CodeMash.  Here is the list of CodeMash sessions as they stand today.  I have highlighted the sessions I am most likely to attend.  I would also like to be able to attend all of the Open Space sessions as I know much valuable discussion will take place. Time travel would certainly make it easier to choose sessions, but would probably be exhausting as well.

What strategies are you going to use to get the most out of CodeMash? 

Wednesday:

Full-Day
CodeJam: Gary Bernhardt, Sarah Dutkiewicz, Joe Fiorini, Corey Haines, John Stockton
.NET 101 With Jeff Blankenburg and Josh Holmes
Java, Groovy, and Grails 101

AM
iPhone Development 101
Test-driven Development 101 With Leon Gersing
Turning the Ship With Dave Donaldson

PM
Kanban 101
iPhone Development 101
Test-driven Development 101 With Phil Japikse
Value Stream Mapping Workshop With Mary Poppendieck

Thursday

8:15am to 9:30am
KEYNOTE #1: Eric Meyer: JavaScript Will Save Us All

9:45am to 10:45am
Dynamic Hyper-Video in Silverlight (Jesse Liberty)
Introducing Agile for Real World Programmers (Greg Huber)
Programming in Scala (Venkat Subramanian)
Introducing the iPhone SDK (Chris Adamson)
Introducing the Live Mesh SDK (Jeff Blankenburg)
Adobe Flex Fundamentals (TBA)

11am to 12pm
Re-thinking UI: WPF Data Templates (Carey Payette)
Three Tips to Improve Your Dev Process (Jim Holmes)
Introducing Prototype and Scriptaculous (Leon Gersing)
Developing JoeMetric for the iPhone (Joe O'Brien)
Pumping Iron into Python: Intro to FePy (Sarah Dutkiewicz)
Developing for the Microsoft Surface (Jennifer Marsman)
Dynamic Languages and the JVM (Nathaniel Schutta)

12:15pm to 1:30pm
LUNCH + KEYNOTE #2: Venkat Subramanian: Pointy-Haired Bosses and Pragmatic Programmers—Facts and Fallacies of Everyday Software Development

1:45pm to 2:45pm
Scaling Habits of ASP.NET Applications (Richard Campbell)
Thrashing (Mary Poppendieck)
Erlang: The Basics (Kevin Smith)
Groovy/Grails for non-Java Developers (Mike Kimsal)
Python Data Visualization and Imaging (Zach Steindler)
Well, Isn't that Spatial (SQL Server Spatial Data) (Jason Follas)
Adobe Flex with MVC Frameworks (Robert O'Malley)

3:35pm to 4:35pm
Demystifying Windows Communications Foundation (Keith Elder)
Soft Skillz (Brian Prince)
Managed Extensibility Framework (Drew Robbins)
IPhone Web Development with Grails (Chris Judd)
Practical Scala (Dianne Marsh)
What? Threads Are Hard? (Jim Weirich)
Functional Concepts for OOP Developers (Bryan Weber)

4:50pm to 5:50pm
Modeling Types with Extension Methods (Bill Wagner)
CI: More than just a toolset (Jay Harris)
Griffon in Front, Grails in Back (Jim Shingler)
Ruby Desktop Application Framework (Lance Carlson)
Microsoft Virtual Earth, Now in 3D! (Aydin Akcasu)
Drupal at Zattoo: A Case Study (Chris Cassell)

Friday
8:15am to 9:30am
KEYNOTE #3: Mads Torgersen: One Big Happy Family – Where are the Managed .NET Programming Languages Heading?

9:45am to 10:45am
Dev Guide: Skinning Silverlight Controls (Jesse Liberty)
Practices of an Agile Developer (Venkat Subramanian)
Grease, a Parallel Systems Architecture (Vielmetti)
Testing Rails (Joe O'Brien)
JVM Scripting with Jython (Mark Ramm)
Test Infecting the Legacy Organization (Nathaniel Schutta)
IronRuby in the Real World (Michael Letterle)

11am to 12pm
Guerilla SOA for WCF (Joshua Graham)
Language-Oriented DDD (David Laribee)
Networking and Communications in Silverlight (John Stockton)
Cool Stuff with Computer Vision (Scott Preston)
Rich Apps with Groovy Swingbuilder (Andres Almiray)

1:45pm to 2:45pm
Deep LINQ: C# Query Expression Pattern (Bill Wagner)
Improving Web Application Performance and Stability (Steve Smith)
Spring 2.5 MVC (Ken Sipe)
Actor Concurrency (Alex Miller)
Introducing BazaarNG (Mike Woelmer and Jay Wren)
A Look Inside Microsoft Labs: Photosynth, Deep Zoom, Live Mesh, and More (Jeff Blankenburg)
A Programmer's Guide to User Experience (Josh Walsh)

3:30pm to 4:30pm
Multi-threading Mojo with F# (Dustin Campbell)
Executable Documentation with easyb (Andrew Glover)
Cloud Computing with .NET (Wesley Faler)
Modern Web Applications with .NET (Drew Robbins)
Ruby Isn't Just About Rails (Adam Wiggins)
Reverse Engineering Applications (Joe Kuemerle)

maggie++

CodeStock's mission is to bring the best and brightest code experts to East Tennessee for a one day conference open to all developers.

Are you among the best and brightest code experts?  If yes, then you are probably already registered.  If not, but you want to be, sign up and join me at CodeStock to learn and keep up with all of the new ways to improve your software skills.

There will be 6 choices of classes during each session and what I'm excited about is there will be Open Spaces all day where you can share and learn about whatever you are interested in. 

Open Space is a way to bring together groups of people interested in a common topic to have an interactive discussion. In an Open Space session, there may be an expert who is passionate about a topic presenting to an audience or there may be a small group of people discussing an idea.

Four principles of Open Space:

1. Whoever comes are the right people to be there
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened
3. Whenever it starts is the right time
4. When it's over, it's over

This is my kind of conference - a place where I can learn from other developers in a relaxed setting in beautiful Tennessee.  

Hope to meet you there.

maggie++