Desert Code Camp Recap

September 17th, 2007

Keep meaning to blog, even go so far as jotting down reminders. Just am not disciplined enough. Really hope to start blogging more about Agile topics, but I don’t want to be “one of those guys”. That is someone who only blogs about not blogging enough.

This past weekend Lorin Thwaits did a phenomenal job of putting on Desert Code Camp . DCC is a nice informal, free tech conference Lorin puts on every fall here in Arizona. This year had over 400 attendees. Including some from Canada, Washington and Utah. Not bad for ad-hoc local tech conference. The thing of most appeal about DCC to me is that it technically agnostic. There are .NET, Adobe, Ruby, Java, PHP, insert technology of choice here presentations put on and available. Cross pollination at its finest. One interesting tid bit was that Software Freedom Day was also celebrated as part of the event.

Another great idea that Lorin implemented this time around was the concept of hardware/book recycling. There was a table at the main entrance that you could leave used/new tech books or hardware for swap. Amazingly, people were leaving really good technical material here, not just stuff from 8 years ago that had no value to anyone.

The down side is my iPhone had some issues and had to be reset (that should be a post in and of itself) and so I lost all the great photos I took of the event. I do apologize and hope that someone posts some on flickr .

Day One

I hit the snooze one too many times and didn’t get up and ready to leave until 9:00am. I had thought things started at 8:00am and that now it might not be worth going as I was going to miss 3 or 4 sessions. I hopped online and found out first session started at 9:15am and second one at 10:30am so I bolted out the door to get to second session!!

Parking was horrible as to be expected at UAT but the folks at Fry’s Electronics were nice enough to offer overflow parking. The facilities at UAT were wonderful and accomodating. Well worth a slight walk.

The first session I attended was “Revision control and proj mgmt with Trac/SVN” by Sean Tierney . I have been really wondering if we could revamp our Trac installs here at Integrum and get more out of them during our agile process. This was a nicely run session and Sean really did a wonderful job presenting. Got to witness some yummy Jump Box goodness and participate in good discussion. Also, found some new good mindmap software as a nice side effect.

From there I headed out to “Introduction to Agile Development” by Josh Knowles and Alan Dayley. Good quick and dirty overview of Agile and some good discussion from some using Agile in real life about what works, what doesn’t. Wish this session could have gone a bit longer or been a bit more round table. Overall, very well attended though. As this session wrapped up, I got into a technical discussion and all my peers bailed on me!!!! Thanks Josh , Linsday , Erica and Curtis !!

From there I headed off “Scrum 101” by Alan Dayley hoping to provide good feedback. Fairly, quickly the magic of twitter started to happen and I was off to lunch with Tim Heuer and others at Tom’s BBQ. The discussion was excellent. It is amazing to see the turn in direction that Microsoft has been taking towards Open Source software and the GNU\Linux community. It is because of guys like Tim that I have a hope that perhaps in the near future Microsoft can be a productive member of the community. Several of us had a good discussion this on day two of DCC, but that too is another post. :)

After lunch I sat in “Using the open-source FitNesse test framework to drive API test automation” by John Quintero of google. It was SOOOOOO nice to see Google out and about at this event and providing valuable technical talks. John did a great overview and FitNesse is certainly interesting. I am not sure how it could fit into our process, but it definitely got me thinking.

I popped over to “iPhone Development” by Josh Knowles and Ian Baird. I was really happy to see Gary had showed up for the session. It was probably the most fun session of the weekend. Light hearted, informative and called me to action. I found out that my phone wants to be free . The cocoa stuff Ian presented for native apps was really exciting.

At this point my mind was getting exhausted and I headed over to “Advanced Javascript” by Michael Ryan. Unfortunately this presentation turned out to be somewhat of a disaster. It got off to a bad start because the projector was on the fritz and so it was almost 20 minutes late in starting. The presenter seemed to know the material pretty well, but was fairly unprepared. I think the excitement from the audience dwindled quickly out of frustration. I wish it would have had a better start as it could of been good.

Finally it was off to Aunt Chillada’s for the Google after party. The mixer was quite nice though in a completely cramped space. It was far far too crowded, but intimate. Insert the need for another blog post here.

Day Two

So after getting a late start on day 1, I headed out early for day 2 to make sure I didn’t miss the first meeting of Refactor Phoenix . The first meeting was definitely a success. There were about 30 people there and Brian Shaler had a good discussion on Google Gears that sadly no one from google attended. :(

I headed to see “TDD and Unit Testing” by Tom Opgenorth one of the guys from Canada. He did an excellent job covering the material and showing examples. It was refreshing to see someone from the .NET world excited about agile and integrating it into their environment. However, it was amazing to see how far behind the game that camp is having a strong framework to really do TDD/BDD. I got a new appreciation for my tool set.

At this point I was starving and nothing on the docket looked worth not missing so Shaler and I headed across the street to grab some Subway. We had a good discussion on writing documentation/books for cutting edge technologies, the problem with social networks and other topics before heading back to DCC.

I head to “Advanced Ruby on Rails” by Josh Knowles. Again was happy to see Gary made it out for presentations. Nice little piece on ActiveResource and some good interactions. Definitely a well attended and vibrant discussion. Sadly, I wasn’t able to stay for the last session on rSpec (that I really wanted to see) as I had an “genius” appointment at the Apple Store to run off to. Maybe I will blog about that later.

All in all this was a great event. It makes me excited for the upcoming Phoenix Dev House and Phoenix Bar Camp so much to do this week and not enough time.