Dan Rigsby - Coding Up Style

Saturday April 26, 2008 ushered in the first IndyCodeCamp.  This event was designed to be a code camp for all languages, but morphed more into a .Net thing this year.  This may change in future events.  I would love to see the event stay mostly .Net focused, but offer at least one track for other languages such as Ruby, Python, etc.  This year we had over 400 people registered for an event that could only accommodate 250 people.  We had a great line up of speakers as well.  I was very anxious in the days leading up to the event.

On Saturday morning, I arrived at IndyCodeCamp around 7am.  The event started at 8am, but I wanted to be sure to get there early to meet with the staff, speakers, and friends.  Part of my job as Logistics Director of IndyNDA is “speaker support”.  So at events like this, it’s my job to make sure the speakers know what is going on and that they are taken care of.  Personally, I just love being able to hang out with all of these great guys and gals.  Anyway, when I got there, I found the building still locked and a number of people standing around outside.  It had been warm all week, but Mother Nature hit us with a cold front, and it was quite chilly standing outside of the building.  Building staff claimed it was a miscommunication, but were were able to get in the building around 7:30am.  Needless to say, it was a mad house trying to get everything set up.  We had expected to have time to setup sign in booths and tables, but the attendees were right behind us.  Things went a little chaotically up until the first session.

Overall the event went off well.  We had a couple of speakers cancel at the last minute, but we were able to fill in their spots.  Out of the 400 people we had registered, only about 170 showed up.  That is quite a drop off rate, but I think the lack of reminder emails and no iCal files, lead to a lot of people forgetting about the event or not thinking they were registered.  Our local Microsoft representatives Dave Bost and Larry Clarkin had family commitments (we understand guys), but Bill Steele was kind enough to make it down, speak at a couple of sessions, show off his new hud, and buy us pizza for lunch.

There were four rooms setup for sessions and one great room where the sponsers were setup and were the speakers could sit.  It was great meeting up with many of my speaker friends from Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Illinois.  It’s nice to see that we had people speaking from all of the surrounding states.  We did have a number of Audio/Video issues in the first couple of sessions, but things got worked out throughout the day and the attendees were patient.

I was fortunate enough to have 3 sessions at IndyCodeCamp.  I was a little worried when I saw that all 3 of them were back to back and that it meant about 4 hours of conversation, but my voice didn’t waver too much and I made it through.  Here are my comment about each session:

• Agile Project Management with Scrum:  This was my first time performing this session and since this was a code camp, I didn’t think it would be accepted.  However, I had 30 people attend which was a lot more than I expected.  Everyone was very attentive and came with a lot of great questions!  I think the slide deck was good and filled up the time nicely.  I got great comments and some nice laughter at some of the “funnier” slides I put in.  I really hope I get a chance to do this session again in the future.  A couple of people afterwards even asked me about presenting this to people at their places of employment.
• Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation: I have done this session a few times now, and it always seems to be a hit.  I was fortunate to have over 50 people attend which ended up being the most popular session of at IndyCodeCamp.  The session went off without a hitch and the modifications I made, helped keep the session more introductory for those who may be new to any kind of connected system development.  I do think I am going to add a couple of new slides to this deck over why we need services.
• Intermediate Windows Communication Foundation: I wanted to discuss the Web Programming Mode, Duplexing, and Asynchronous Operations all in one session.  I hated the name that I gave the session, but I couldn’t think of anything better.  However, I really under estimated how much I can talk about a topic. In the future I will break this up into three self contained sessions.  The talk today went well though. and I had about 28 people attend. But I really had to rush a couple of the topics, and I felt that I lost the audience when I talked about Duplexing.  In my next Duplexing talk, I will have a lot more “lead up” slides to help introduce the topic to the audience.

Because my sessions ate up the 2nd half of the day, I didn’t get to attend any of the afternoon sessions. And during the first half of the day, the best I could do was to take a sampling of each of the sessions.  Overall, I think everyone did a good job.  A few sessions had some issues, but I hope that doesn’t scare the speakers away from speaking again in the future.  The comments I heard from the attendees though were all positive.

After the event of a few of the speakers made it down to Champp’s for a little after-party.  Everyone was invited, but only some of the speakers showed up.  I hope in the future, more attendees will make to out.  It’s important to interact with your peers when possible.

I want to thank all of the speakers and staff for making this event a success.  I hope to see many of you again next year!  And to those who read this blog regularly, I apologize for the lack of posts this past week.  I have 4 great Wcf posts in draft state at the moment, but I spent most of time this week preparing my sessions for this event.

The materials from my sessions can be found here:

• http://www.danrigsby.com/Files/Presentations/AgileMgmtWithScrum.zip
• http://www.danrigsby.com/Files/Presentations/IntroductionToWcf.zip
• http://www.danrigsby.com/Files/Presentations/IntermediateWcf.zip