My CodeCamp RDU 2010 Experience

This past Saturday was my first CodeCamp and my first time speaking at an event.  My talk covered a project I’ve been working that uses IronRuby to generate a data access layer and domain layer classes.  The slides can be found here.  The experience of giving a talk is something everyone should do at least once.  It helped me get a better understanding of the subject I was speaking about and a new perspective on what people go through to put a talk together.

Since my talk was in the afternoon I spent the morning going to talks.  The first talk I attended was titled ‘Unit Testing for the rest of us’.  It was a nice introduction to unit testing and why you should incorporate it into your projects.  You can check out the slides here.  Eli did a great job with the talk.

The next talk was ‘Dynamic Programming in a Statically Typed World’ by Jim Wooley.  The talk wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be but I still learned a few things. The thing about attending any talk is you will always learn at least one thing that you can apply.  The next day I was working on a personal project and I remembered the dynamic keyword demo that Jim gave and used it to resolve a sticky problem. 

Since lunch was right after Jim’s talk a co-worker and I ate shared a table with Jim.  We had a great conversation around writing your own IQueryable implementation and a little bit about natural language processing.  A definite positive to attending local talks is the availability of the speakers. After most talks they are open to continue any discussions that may have occurred during their talk.

After lunch I went to Mike O’Brien’s talk ‘What is F# and Why Should I Care?’.  It was a nice introduction into functional programming using F#.  The last talk I attended was also given by Mike.  It was titled ‘Release Management with Go/Ruby/Rake/Albacore’.  A little short and not as much on the ruby portion of the talk which is what I was hoping for.  However it was a nice introduction into Go.  The talk also spawned a conversation about other CI servers out there, such as TeamCity..

Overall it was a good experience.  I met a few people and had nice discussions.  Like I said, I have already used information I gained on Saturday.  If there is a CodeCamp in your area I would recommend attending and/or speaking at it.

The slides from my talk are here.  The source is here.