Code Mash 2012: Bacon for the Brain
I was delighted to see first hand, why 1200 CodeMash tickets sold out in 20 minutes. It was full of awesome. This was easily the biggest conference that I have ever attended. It was held in the luxurious and fun Kalahari conference center and ran as smooth as silk, expertly supported by a volunteer staff.
One of the things that I really appreciated about the conference was the diversity of people from different technology backgrounds. There were many developers from .NET, Java, Ruby, and Python worlds all coming together to swap stories, share ideas and learn something new. It created an opportunity for everyone to get out of their box and their comfort zone. I was particularly impressed by one woman that I talked to, who came from the .NET world but had made a conscious decision to not attend any .NET talks at all.
The talks that I attended were all superb. Here is a few of my personal highlights:
Jim Weirich’s Roman Numeral Code Kata: He did a live coding demonstration of the Roman Numeral kata by TDD and refactoring. The joy that he shows when his tests turn green and the love of the beauty of the code that emerges from refactoring, embody for me what Software Craftsmanship is all about. He simply is an inspiration.
Joshua Smith’s Prolog Talk: An excellent talk by and excellent speaker. He demonstrated the basics of Prolog reasoning by doing a family tree example. I am intrigued by it’s use with Semantic Web RDF reasoning and it’s similarity to Clojure’s core.logic. It is top of my list of things to look into.
Jen Myer’s Developers Can’t Design: She touched a chord for me, since I wish that I had more design skill. She masterfully pointed out the similarities of solving problems in design just as we solve problems in code development. Another key take away for me, was the need to have a holistic design for our applications. Siloing designers in Photoshop and then having developers take it from there is reminiscent of failed waterfall patterns. Embracing holistic design feedback at all levels of the project is needed to produce excellent applications.
Elizabeth Naramore’s Building Open Source Communities: This talk was a gem. She touched on the importance of Open Source communities by focusing on it’s essential component – people. Communication is so important in facilitating the flow of ideas that turns into the magic that fuels a vibrant community. One of her points, that I took away is to remember it is the little things that count. Don’t forget to say “Thank you.”
Another thing that delighted me was the strong interest in Clojure that was present at the conference. I had the good fortune to present an introduction to Clojure and I was so happy to talk to many people during the conference that said that they were interested in learning more at the language. There was even an Open Space that got spontaneously organized on Clojure on Friday.
The only downside of the conference was that it was hard to choose between the Open Spaces and the excellent talks going on. I did attend one that Justin Searls hosted on Friday afternoon. It was a blast. People paired up creating a simple JavaScript To Do app from different frameworks. John Andrews and I took the opportunity to explore ClojureScript. In particular, we played around with the new ClojureScript One and also the Enfocus library. At the end of the hour, we were having so much fun, I wished that we had another day just to continue.
All in all, it was an awesome time and I recommend it highly. If I had to sum it up in a phrase it would be: Bacon for the Brain :)