CodeMash 2013: Event Recap

Stellar Sessions, Good times, Great folks!

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the CodeMash event in Sandusky, Ohio.  Hailing from Detroit, it was great to be back in my childhood summer stomping ground.   As a strong supporter of the development community, Infragistics was proud to be a sponsor.  Jim Holmes did an outstanding job as the lead organizer of the event.  It was held in the lively yet calming Kalahari resort which houses the nation’s largest indoor water park.  1,500 developers filled the sessions and informal discussion coves throughout the conference center creating an invigorating vibe!

Highlights

Standard Session Subjects

• Latest software development practices and methodologies
• Development languages / technologies
• .Net
• Java
• Ruby
• HTML5 / CSS
• iOS

PreCompiler Sessions

These extended sessions offered in-depth, hands-on learning experiences.  Each was a half to a full day in duration.  I’ve described my favorite pre-compiler session in a subsequent section of this article.

Family Inclusion

One of the things that made this conference unique is the family focus.   Not only did the organizers encourage attendees to bring their spouses and children, they actually included specific activities.   Coined as “KidzMash,” this group of sessions included topics such as:

• Internet Safety
• Programming Kinect
• R/C Helicopters

Favorite Session

An abundance of illuminating sessions made it challenging to name a favorite.  However, I truly enjoyed the “Choose Your Own Application - The Mystery of the Single-Page App” session by Dennis Burton and Brian Genisio.  This session was themed after the “Choose your own adventure” books that I grew up with.  This three-hour session walked folks through building a SPA from scratch.  In a sense, it was technology stack agnostic.  Attendees were given the choice of technology to choose for each area as they moved through the exercise.  For example, for the client-side library, you could pick Knockout or Backbone.  And you could choose Node.js or ASP.Net for the server-side technology.  It allowed folks to venture outside of their comfort zone with the confidence of knowledgeable instructors by their side.

Another favorite included Leon Gersing’s “Speaker Workshop.”  This session was targeted at techies looking to sharpen their speaking skills. 

 

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