My summer has been what seems like a
steady stream of major events in the development community. It really
all began with my election to the board of GLUGnet last April, which immediately put me as a
planner for the first Lansing Day of .Net, for which I handled the web site
and branding. The event, which I blogged about previously, was
held on June 21, 2008, and was a huge success. We will definitely have
the conference again next year, and are already brainstorming ways to
make the event even better.
Three weeks after LDODN, on July
11-13, was Ann Arbor Give Camp. Give
Camp was an event for charity, where area developers volunteered their
weekend to code for charity. The Heartland District truly displayed
their selflessness and passion with their willingness to endure three
days of Ninjas-On-Fire coding, often sacrificing sleep to accomplish
deadlines, to help out not-for-profits that likely would never have the
budget for a high-quality, professionally developed web site. I was
also impressed by the event sponsors for their donations and
contributions; Washtenaw Community College provided the venue for no cost, Verio
provided free hosting for each charity's site until 2010, and Microsoft
provided to each of the charities free copies of all of the software
needed to support and maintain the new applications. The planning staff
should be commended for this event, too; they went to no end to enable
the development teams, and to meet our every desire. There was plenty
of food, plenty of snacks, plenty of fluids, and plenty of games for
when we needed to occasionally decompress. We requested ice cream; we
got ice cream. Someone on my team even requested a Cherry Coke, and one
of the organizers made a midnight run to the local gas station to pick
up a bottle. The event was great, and we had a blast. I will be there
next year, maybe even running a team of my own.
Another four weeks brought CodeStock, August 9, in Knoxville, TN. Dave Redding,
The Wife, and I hopped in Dave's Charger and cruised the nine hours
from Brighton, MI to Knoxville on Friday night, arriving at about
3:30am for the 7:30am registration. Michael Neel and crew put on a great show. I finally got to
see the Joe O'Brian / Amanda Laucher presentation on DSLs and Brian H. Prince's 'Soft Skillz
' talk. (I highly recommend both.) But what really made the event were
the Open Spaces, organized by Alan Stevens. We
had some enlightening discussions, such as improving User Group
participation, and developing in .Net on a Mac. The after party at
Alan's house included a time for socializing outside of a technical
setting, and included a friendly game of Texas Hold'em. Dennis Burton
was the big winner, and graciously donated his winnings to the Hands On
Museum in Ann Arbor, the charity that Michael Eaton worked on during
Give Camp.
In the shortest gap of the summer, I only had to wait two more weeks for devLink, August 22-23, in Murfreesboro, TN. However, there was no 9 hour drive, as The Wife and I hitched a ride on the devLink Bus. Organized by Amanda Laucher
(and others)--my employer, Latitude Consulting Group, was also one of
the sponsors--we chartered a coach for the weekend to take some of the
local developers down to devLink. The bus started in Grand Rapids, and
made pick-up stops in Lansing, Detroit, Toledo, Columbus, and
Cincinnati. We made some "detours" along the way, and the seats were a
little uncomfortable for sleeping, but we all had a great time; we had
some great discussion, we watched some movies, and Mike Eaton, The
Wife, Eric Vogel , and I even played a few rounds of euchre. We had one
minor glitch on the return trip, as one of the right rear tires blew
out at about 1:30am while traveling at 65mph up I-71, but we even had
fun on the 3 1/2 hour delay, as we took over a Waffle House in Carrollton, Kentucky, were entertained by "The Great Pork Chop Incident," and a
few riders extended the Open Spaces discussions from the conference.
As for devLink itself, I went to focus on the Open Spaces. Four
different Open Space discussions were on hand for each of the session
blocks throughout the two-day conference. I attended sessions on
Developing the Developer Community; on why Comments are Evil; on How
"Should" Changed My Life (a discussion on BDD
, and creating effective tests); on Microsoft, Open Source, and
CodePlex; and I facilitated a discussion on Continuous Integration. I
only went to one session throughout the conference: Jeff Blankenburg's
talk on Silverlight. I challenged him to show me a reason to use
Silverlight that didn't include gradients, spinning ghost animations,
or anything else that I have been able to do in Flash since version 4.
After his talk, I'm actually motivated to dig in. Over the years, I
have created a few Flash games--nothing too special, as they were
primarily about learning a specific component, like collision
detection--and I plan on starting with converting them to Silverlight.
It should give me a good opportunity to grok the space.
But to me, the best part about this summer isn't the things I have
learned, or the code I've produced, but the relationships and bonds
that have formed. I have made many new connections this summer, and
made some great new friendships, and I look forward to many more. The
list is made up of people all smarter than I am, yet I am treated as an
equal. Every time we connect, I learn a lot, professionally and
personally. I have grown a lot over this past year, and I owe every bit
of it to them (and to the kick in the pants from Dennis Burton that
pushed me to get involved in the first place).
Here's to what's next.