I had never been to a multi-day developer conference… until I attended Codemash last week.  For those of you who don’t know what Codemash is (and if you are a software developer, it’s time you learn!), Codemash is a multi-language and platform conference held at the beautiful Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, Ohio. It is generally well attended by practitioners of .NET, Java, Ruby, iOS, JavaScript and other languages, all interested in crafting better software, no matter the language or platform of choice.  In my humble opinion, Codemash is a damn fine conference for almost anyone who participates in the software development process – designers, project managers, scrum masters, testers, etc.  Despite the fact that most of the sessions are developer-centric, there still were a fair amount of talks on user experience, agile practices, and software quality.  A few of my favorite talks:

• HTML5 is Here and the Web Will Never Be the Same (Brandon Satrom and Clark Sell).  This was a half-day hands-on session where we explored some of the new semantic tags of HTML5, new CSS3 features, and some JavaScript libraries to help implement new features on old browsers.  Brandon and Clark both did a great job of making this an informative and fun pre-compiler.  This presentation helped spur me implement some of the HTML5 markup in my blog’s theme.
• Once Upon a Time in Clojureland: Learning Clojure with a Fairy Tale (Carin Meier).  I had very little knowledge of Clojure, or any other functional language when I walked into the room.  Carin did an excellent job of introducing us newbies to Clojure with a very clever and easy to understand presentation.  Once the session concluded, I felt myself wanting more time to work with the language and to learn it better.  I’m not exactly certain how I will use it for my day job, but it doesn’t matter – I still want to expand my horizons and learn more about the language.
• Hands-On Responsive and Adaptive Web Design (Ben Callahan).  Although some techniques on HTML and CSS were covered in this session, I appreciated the user-centered approach in the presentation most.  I am not by far a user experience expert, but I really do enjoy a good user experience presentation.  Ben’s talk really emphasized how important it is for a website to be flexible amongst different displays and browsers.  And with more and more people using smartphones and tablets, the ability for the display to adapt to smaller screens in a pleasing way cannot be overlooked.

I attended several other very good sessions, mostly in .NET.  But, after 10 years of mostly living in the .NET world, I think I got a little more out of the sessions that brought me out of my usual domain.  That’s one thing I really enjoyed about Codemash – there were a LOT of different backgrounds present.  Some of the best open source .NET projects have been inspired by other frameworks (how many have been ported from Java?), so a Microsoft-centered developer can certainly gain a fresh perspective with a conversation with a Java or Ruby developer.  I also carpooled to Sandusky with a coworker who has been doing a lot of iOS development lately, that gave a great perspective on developing for mobile platforms.

Even though Codemash was a wonderful experience for me, I think I could have had an even better experience if I had done a few things differently.

• I generally didn’t pay too much attention to the open spaces.  I think a couple of the sessions would have been better spent working with other developers on actual code or practicing something I had learned.  Yes, most of the sessions were good and well-presented, just a couple of them were not interesting or relevant to me.
• I also should have attended a couple of the craftsmanship specific sessions.  I tended to stick to language or framework-specific sessions, while missing out on some talks or coding that would have helped in creating better software.  This included some of the TDD talks and some of the Katas.
• This post would not be complete without an area of improvement from the photography perspective.  Although I did take some decent snapshots of the speakers, I needed to take more photos of the entire experience.  Admittedly, I felt constrained at times since I still don’t have a mid-range zoom, I had to switch lenses too often to get to the wide to normal range.  The 70-300mm lens did quite well on capturing the speakers up close, but anything else required switching to a lens that may not have been a good choice. But, other than that lousy excuse, I don’t think I was very creative in my photographic choices.  I should have moved around a bit more and captured more of the happenings outside of the sessions.

If I had to pick out one theme from Codemash that really stuck with me (other than bacon), it would be passion.  Passion for the technology, passion for learning, passion for creating great software.  At a conference like Codemash, passion is a theme that was echoed over and over no matter whom you talked to.  And I have to admit that this conference did ignite my passion for software development and reminded me why I love it.  Even if I haven’t been able to play around programming as much as I would have liked, at least I feel a bit more invigorated.  Feeling inspired to learn is alone worth the price of admission!

I definitely hope to attend Codemash next year, and if I address a couple of those areas of improvement I think I will get even more out of the conference.  Attendance seems to grow every year, so I need to make sure I have a quick trigger finger again to claim my spot!  Until next year, Codemash, goodbye and thanks for all of the bacon!