Community

Alcohol and Geek Conferences

So there was a lot of tweets today about alcohol at conferences and folks feeling left out.

The original post was actually making a point about not being able to have meaningful conversations with smart folks once they get sauced.  I’ve definitely ran into that at some conferences.  While at the Microsoft MVP conference last month there was someone who had consumed too much and abruptly interrupted a conversation I was having with someone else.  I’m always opened to including anyone in any conversation I’m having at a conference, but this was overbearing and obnoxious.  It wasn’t the conference’s fault but the person who consumed too much.  Now that I think of it, this happened twice on two different nights at the conference by different people.  Hadn’t thought about it much before.

A lot of the article seemed to address something that I haven’t ran into – conference organizers talking up the booze.  Most of the conferences I have gone to are Microsoft conferences.  From Convergence with big budgets for their partners and customers who spend millions of dollars on different ERP systems (like Dynamics AX, GP and NAV as well as Dynamics CRM) to Gamefest which has just a few hundred game developers (mainly guys from AAA studios and some indie folks like myself) along with those in between.  I’ve also been to some community conferences like Codestock.  There was alcohol available but it wasn’t a drunkfest – or at least I didn’t see it if it was.  So perhaps it is just the JS conferences where this occurs or perhaps I’m too blind to see it.  There typically is some party event but it seems that most folks leave those to go to a bar to hang out and/or really get hammered.  I’ve not joined anyone at the bar after the main event closes down at 10 or so.  It seems it is common for folks to not come back until 2AM or so.  They typically miss the sessions the next morning.  I’m not going to miss a session when I’ve paid money for the conference.  Some folks go just to socialize and have those conversations while sessions are going on.  I typically don’t.  I could see great benefit in that, but unless there is no topic I’m interested in or the speaker is having a hard time I tend to stick to sessions.  I do like open spaces for the times when nothing else fits.  

Regardless, I didn’t feel excluded because folks were drinking and I wasn’t.  I chose not to go to the bars in wee hours of the morning but even if it wasn’t at a bar I’d probably not go anyway since I’d want to get to the sessions in the morning.  I’m definitely not a Brogrammer. Oh well, wasn’t cool in high school, why should I start now?

Warning: Contains Offensive Language

This has nothing to do with conferences, but when thinking about feeling left out I recall going out to dinner with some coworkers and their wives about a decade ago.  We all had a good time, I thought.

A couple months later I found out that the group had done a couple more of those dinners but I hadn’t heard about them.  I was confused as to why I wasn’t asked to join them again.  When I asked a good friend why we weren’t invited he told me.

It seems that my wife and I were the only people that didn’t order any alcohol. I was shocked to hear this was why I was excluded.  I asked if I came across as descending or anything. I was assured that I wasn’t but they didn’t feel comfortable drinking around us.

That blew me away.  So I felt left out but it was because I made them feel uncomfortable.  I didn’t say anything about them consuming the beverages.  Just the act of me ordering a Mountain Dew instead of a Budweiser caused discomfort with my coworkers.  I still don’t understand this.  Regardless, you won’t hear me passing judgment on someone who is drinking beer or wine. I hope people don’t pass judgment on me because I prefer carbonated drinks.

So I guess when it comes to drinking at conferences I think the thing I try to do is make sure I’m not making someone else uncomfortable.  I’m not uncomfortable talking to someone with a beer or wine glass in their hand. I don’t want them to be uncomfortable with me because I have a soft drink in mine.

There are better ways to have meaningful conversations than at a loud bar or party event.  I typically don’t stay at those too long because you can’t have a good conversation.  I’ll go back to my room and write some code and reflect on the things I learned.  I hadn’t really considered those events really part of the conference so I didn’t mind.  Of course, open bars have got to be expensive.  I sure hope I’m not paying for that in the price of my conference ticket.

In my opinion conferences are there so we can learn and be around folks with the same interests. Meaningful conversations are easier to have when someone isn’t plastered but I’ve only seen that a few times.  Of course, I head back to the hotel room around the time folks are looking for a bar after the party so I probably avoid seeing a lot of it.

As with everything, moderation is the key.  Anything to excess is bad – including coding non stop and constantly thinking about work.  That is excess and it isn’t healthy and I constantly do it.

Chad Carter 3 Comments

SIEGECon 2010

I had the opportunity to speak at SIEGECon 2010. SIEGE stands for Southern Interactive Entertainment & Game Expo.  Pretty cool acronym. 

So I drove down to Atlanta on Thursday, September 30th. It is about 300 miles/5 hours from the Greensboro area. I arrived Thursday night late. I stayed at a hotel down the road since it was about half the price of the hotel where the conference was being held. It was only a 3 minute drive, so no big deal there.

I spent an hour trying to get my Xbox 360 on the hotel wireless since I would need it for the XNA session I would be giving on Saturday.  After trying a few things with no success I went to bed around 1:30.

I was up early to attend and the WP7 training with Glen Gordon and help answer any questions on XNA.  The WP7 event was 4 hours of tutorials that was not really part of the actual conference.  There were over 200 high school students brought into sessions that Friday morning.  There were probably 30 that rotated in and out of the WP7 sessions.  Glen did a great job with the presentation and I heard several folks talking very excitedly about the phone.  There was even one person who sent a message to his friend in an Adobe session to come over to hear Glen’s presentation. That was cool.

After the WP7 tutorials, we had a nice lunch provided.  I was able to talk with Andrew Greenberg, the conference’s organizer about the conference.  We had a good conversation about community and the conference.  He introduced me to Noah Falstein, one of the key note speakers for the event.

After lunch, I went to a deserted room to try and get my Xbox 360 on the hotel’s WiFi.  I was making the assumption that if I could get it to work in one hotel, it would work in the other. The problem is that hotels shove a proxy in between the machine and the internet.  This redirects traffic to the hotel’s agreement page (where you may have to actually pay for access).  This is all done through a web browser.  When connecting through a laptop this is no problem.  Enter the credentials in the web form and you are on your way.  The Xbox 360 has no browser and that is the problem.  So I messed with that for another hour and half before the room was being occupied for an upcoming session.  I didn’t make any headway and packed everything up and put it in the car and then headed to the first actual session of the conference.

The first official session of the conference I attended was “Speed Dating”.  No, I wasn’t looking for a date.  I’m happily married.  This was a session to network. It was a lot of fun and I was able to meet a lot of folks in a short amount of time.  I met teams that were just starting up and had a game concept together but nothing else to teams that had everything and were looking for networking support. I met graphic designers, other developers, audio gurus and even cartoonists. It really was a great way to kick off the conference.

nolanbushnellAfter the first session was the keynote.  The keynote speaker was Nolan Bushnell, who co-founded Atari, founded Chuck E. Cheese and founded uWink.  I’m a huge Atari fan. I have wanted a retro Atari shirt for the longest time, but none of those “70’s/80’s” stores ever carried them.  Once I found out that Nolan was going to be the keynoter, I jumped online and ordered 3 Atari shirts.  One is actually a Pong shirt with an Atari logo and the other two have the Atari logo with the word Atari underneath it.  I wore an Atari shirt each day I was there.  I was proud of my nerdyness.  I actually wore my Pong shirt on this day since Nolan is credited for creating Pong.  The actual development was done by his co-worker, Al Alcorn.

Nolan’s speech was excellent.  He had images from the early days when Atari created Computer Space.  He talked about some of the specs for the Atari VCS 2600.  For example, it only had 128 bytes of memory.  That’s bytes – not kilobytes! 

For those that remember the original starter kit that came with XNA called SpaceWar.  That was created after the first ever computer game.  SpaceWar! ran on multimillion dollar mainframes and Nolan played it while he was in college. That is what inspired him to create Atari to sell coin operated games.

Nolan spent some time also discussing some Economic Models like Subscriptions, Buy the box, Download, Free to play / pay to win, and Ad Supported when it comes to games and software in general.  He talked some on Augmented Reality and the future of games.  It was a really interesting talk.

There were some interesting quotes I jotted down while he spoke:

“You should fire 5 to 10% of your people every year.” – I have read of GE doing this. And then seeing the Netflix PowerPoint to their managers on culture and business last year, I really agree with this philosophy.

“Home schoolers get into colleges easier than public school and that is wrong.” – We homeschool our children, but I didn’t see this as a slam to homeschooling based on how he was talking, it was definitely a slam on the public school system.  He definitely thinks that the “problem with schools is 1/3 of the teachers are dumb as a post.”  I believe that is what led into his comment about firing 5 to 10% of employees every year.  I’m not opposed to the public school system.  I think a lot of the success behind home schools comes from the ratio involved.  1:1 or 1:4 is much better than a typical class room of 1:30.  1 teacher for 30 or more students just becomes a lot of crowd control.  People don’t learn the same way.  Folks get left behind because they didn’t understand something that was presented.  When a teacher only needs to worry about a few students they can take time to make sure the student understands before moving on.

Another quote of his was “Privacy – Get over it.” – He mentioned this when talking about Mobile games and GPS / Location aware apps.

“You are smart. Procreate.” was another quote from his talk.  He then went from this into the best quote from the session:

“The best life is a life of balance.”

After his keynote a few of us were able to chat with him afterwards around a table. I was amazed by how he made himself available.  During his talk, I noticed when he talked about Nintendo’s Wii and PlayStations Move that he didn’t mention Kinect for the Xbox 360.   I also noticed he didn’t mention Windows Phone 7 after talking about Android and the iPhone.  Around the table, I asked him if he had any thoughts on WP7.  To my surprise he suggested to not spend any time on that device.  I asked why and he thought that carriers weren’t going to carry the phone.  It seems to me they are, although Verizon and Sprint will be early next year.  Unfortunately, I must disagree with him on this point, but it was definitely awesome to get to talk to him and hear insight on many different subjects.

That evening there was a party by the pool area, but it was entirely too loud so I went back to my hotel to test out the 360 some more for my presentation the next day. Everything worked on the first try, but my TV Card had a device driver failure but I could still use it. 

The next morning, I showed up early to get 360 going in the room I was going to speaking in. I didn’t get a chance to get it setup before the first session started, so I left the 360 in place (behind the podium) and packed up the rest and headed to the Augmented Reality session.  This was a great session and seeing the stuff Georgia Tech and SCAD did with the android and a cardboard city on the table was amazing. 

Augmented Reality

Unfortunately, I had to leave early so I had enough time to setup for my session.

With the 30 minutes between sessions I had just enough time to get my environment setup for my talk on Xbox 360 Programming with XNA.  The 360 was online and I was able to launch XNA Game Studio Connect.  (This was done by sharing my wireless connection on my laptop.) The video card was doing its job (although the error message was on the screen, but I just moved it down toward the taskbar.)  PowerPoint was queued, VS2008 and VS2010 were loaded with my projects.  Projector was display my laptop correctly (for the most part).  So I was really happy.  This had a lot of moving parts and many things could have gone wrong. Fortunately, nothing did.  I had a lot of material to cover and an hour wasn’t really long enough and so I didn’t really get to show too many demos.  However, everyone that talked to me afterwards couldn’t believe just how easy it was to get up and going on the 360.  Mission accomplished.  Now I was going to be able to enjoy the rest of the conference without worrying about my presentation not going to plan.

I put all of my gear back in my car and then grabbed some lunch. The boxed lunches at this conference were nice.  After lunch, I hit up my first Serious Games session.  I was hoping to be able to meet some folks in this area as I’d love to be able to do more game development in the business world.

David Warhol taught the session The Five Ms of Serious Game Development.  It was a great session with student participation. We went through the exercise of designing serious games based off of budget and other restrictions.  It was a great session and I learned a lot.

The next session I went to was also on the Serious Games track and discussed 3D in Serious Games. It was a good session as well. There was some mention of SecondLife and OpenSim.

The Keynote was presented by Noah Falstein. He focused on game design in his talk.  He also talked about The 400 Project which is trying to create a certain number of rules (400) around game design.  The list is currently up to 112.  Take a look at the list if you are designing any games it is always good to keep these things in mind when designing a game or a level.

The first session of the final day was a panel session with Nolan Bushnell and Noah Falstein on “How did we get here”.  This was a fantastic session and I learned quite a bit just hearing these two guys chat.

I then attended the “Not losing your balance: making gameplay fair” from a couple of developers that worked on Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution.

The last session I attended before leaving was Serious Games in Management and Commerce.  I had just started my GlobalCove Technologies company and one of the areas we want to become more involved in is Serious Games.  All of these talks were excellent.

The conference was a huge success.  I learned a lot and was able to meet a lot of talented people.  The best part was it only 300 miles away from my home instead of 3,000.  Typically I have to head to the west coast to attend a game developer conference like this.  I’ll be going back next year.

Chad Carter 2 Comments

MVP Awarded for 2010

MVP_FullColor_ForScreenOnce again I was given the MVP Award in the area of XNA and DirectX. I’m really excited about being apart of the MVP program again this year. Because of Windows Phone 7 there is a lot more interest in XNA which is great because if you are wanting to make games then there isn’t an easier framework to use. There are tons of 3rd party components and engines being written now.

Writing apps in Silverlight is also extremely easy to develop in. This all stems from .NET in general. Back in 2000 when I first heard about .NET and ASP+ (to be called ASP.NET) I fell in love with it. The turn around time on new technology has been remarkable over the last few years. I believe this is because of the maturity of the .NET Framework and Microsoft being able to build upon that excellent foundation.

I encourage you to download the developer tools at http://developer.windowsphone.com/windows-phone-7

Also, I really encourage you to look at http://communitymegaphone.com/ to determine what community events are going on around you. You will grow as a developer tremendously by connecting with likeminded people and discussing technology that you are passionate about.

Also, and most importantly, get involved in your local user group. INETA has a great tool for this: http://ineta.org/UserGroups/FindUserGroups.aspx

I’m really thrilled that I received this award for 2010. I’m really looking forward to going to the Summit again next year. Being able to talk directly with the teams that create the technologies I use every day is outstanding.

The last thing I want to mention is that if you attend a user group and you have never presented on a topic before then I strongly encourage you to pick a topic you are passionate about and talk to your user group leaders about presenting. I really enjoy hearing folks who are passionate about a technology even if they have never spoke publicly before. Get active!

Chad Carter 2 Comments

CodeStock 2010 Experience

I drove to Knoxville on Thursday and checked in to the hotel at about 6:30 PM.  I didn’t stay at the Hilton even though there was a nice discounted rate for the conference.  I was just too cheap and stayed at a hotel with a number in the name.  It was probably the worst room I have ever stayed in but it allowed me to stay an extra night which turned out to be great.

Hotel wasn't quite this bad After checking into the hotel I drove downtown to meet up with the folks at a local grill. I arrived about 7:30 because I was driving around to find a free place to park – are you seeing a pattern?  We all knew ahead of time that we had to be out by 8:00 because of another party coming in.  So I just ordered a Mt. Dew and got to talk with Rafe Kemmis which I met in Raleigh one year at a CodeCamp.  I said hi to Alan Stevens and Rachel Appel and met some new folks.  We then moved to Market Square and sat on a patio and talked some more.  Michael Neel, the conference organizer and all around superman, dropped by and I got to see him for a minute.  I then headed back to the hotel to put the finishing touches on my XNA Crash Course presentation.

PreStock Dinner

Back at the hotel room I realized that I couldn’t access the net.  I had to go into the breakfast area to be close enough to their router it seemed.  Not a huge deal but they said they had WiFi in the rooms.

The next morning I drove downtown and parked in a place I knew I was going to have to pay for, but I didn’t want to chance being late. Later that evening I realized that if I just drove down one more block I could have saved 10 bucks. I broke my cheap pattern but didn’t want to drive around downtown and increase my chances of going the wrong way down a one way street.

CodeStock RegistrationCodeStock T-Shirt Design Registration was a breeze!  I gave them my name and got a nice badge and a bag and a shirt. Sweet! 

Cicelie did a great job designing the shirts! Make sure to check Rachel’s post (where I ‘borrowed’ the image) to see the meaning behind this design.

 

Friday Session 1

Mindstorm Robot For the first session I went to Mindstorming 101 with Nathan Blevins.  I first met Nathan in Seattle back in February.  I was there for the MVP Summit and he was there for the ASP Insiders conference.

This was the first time I heard Nathan speak and he did a fantastic job. It was a great talk. I came in with only the knowledge that Robotics Studio existed and downloaded it once.  I hadn’t looked it for more than 2 hours.  I left this session with a renewed desire to download the new R3 version and try out some things.  Nathan did a fantastic job in this session. I really want to fool with the manifest files to fool with the virtual worlds that are rendered with XNA.

Friday Session 2

I was caught in the hallway and was talking so I was a little late for this talk but I was really looking forward to it.  The session was 7 Easy Steps to Becoming an Independent Consultant with John Feminella.  He had excellent real world information from budgeting to determining your rate based on current salary to tools used to get the job done.  It was another fantastic talk.

Friday Session 3

I actually talked during this session.  The slides can be found on my XNA Essentials site.  This talk could have gone better.  I ran out of time because I dove too deep into the XNA Framework’s Content Pipeline.  I must really like the content pipeline because I tend to get bogged down talking about it a lot.  It just wasn’t appropriate for an introductory talk.  As a result I didn’t get to demo any of the 3D demos and games.  I was able to talk to some folks later that attended and answered questions but I was aggravated with myself for not leaving time for questions.

Friday Session 4

Codestock was setup so that you could either do lunch during Session 3 or Session 4.  I didn’t think about it later but the folks that attended my talk must have really wanted to be there to wait for lunch.  Lunch was catered and it was fantastic.  You basically made your own sandwiches and had choices of different salads on the first day.  They also had a wide variety of deserts as well.  I opted for the strawberry pie and it was excellent.

During lunch, I had a good conversation with a couple of folks from Cadre5. 

Friday Session 5

Architect Hand

This was a fantastic session from Jennifer Marsman, a Microsoft Developer Evangelist located in Michigan.  She talked about the new Architecture tools in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.  These tools are fantastic at helping you keep to your original architecture but also shows the existing architecture for existing assemblies.  The source code isn’t required as it inspects the .NET Intermediate Language (IL).  She has a lot of entries regarding these tools on her blog so make sure to check them out.

Friday Session 6

The last session I attended for the day was WCF Data Services – Making Data Accessible to Everyone by Don Browning. The session was great and I learned a lot about OData. I think I may practice by consuming some Netflix data. 

Keynote

Rachel Appel did the keynote.  The topic was community. I have never seen anything like it. Instead of taking the opportunity to talk about the subject for an extended period of time she opened up the stage to folks in the community to talk about the community. A couple of folks who talked were pre-planned but the majority were pure impromptu.  It was great.

CodeStock Keynote

Rachel Appel hands the mic over to Jennifer Marsman to talk about the WIT community.

Friday Night

After the keynote I ate dinner with Rafe Kemmis at the same grill we all met the first night.  I didn’t grab any dinner there the first night due arriving close to the time we were going to leave.  However, I was really wanting a cheeseburger from the night before so after trying to get into a couple of other restaurants down in the Market Square area we settled on the grill. The burger was fantastic and the conversation was awesome.  If you get the chance, ask Rafe about his travel experience to CodeStock last year in 2009.

After dinner, Rafe and I headed back to the Hilton as we knew they had a room reserved for “Playing Guitars and Socializing”.  We walked in and Alan Stevens was standing up jamming on his guitar with several others playing right along with him.  I had good conversations with Roger Heim and Wendy Czymoch.I left early to work on my Artificial Intelligence talk back at my cheap hotel. Spending the extra time really paid off.  I was able to reorganize the points so they flowed in a more logical manner.

The downside to not doing that before hand was that I left before Wendy and her son (and others) worked on getting the MindStorm robot working.

Saturday Session 1

After parking in a free nights / weekends parking garage close by I grabbed a water in the main lobby area and then headed for the first session.  I didn’t give myself much socializing time before the 8:30 AM session.

Going Independent 101 Michael Eaton did a session titled “Going Independent 101: Lessons learned from a decade of independence”.  It was great to see another perspective from the independent world.  There was tons of great information in this session.  The biggest thing I got out of it was to find the right folks to work with.  It is important to find the right accountant and lawyer to work with you.  Find folks that you get along with and that proactively help you if possible.

The next biggest thing I got was finding the tools that cause you the least amount of friction.  There was absolutely no love for QuickBooks by any of the consultants that did these types of sessions.  It is just too big and bulky and gets in your way. Just like anything in life, finding the right tools for the job is half the battle.

Saturday Session 2

Patrick Foley, a Microsoft employee, had a session called “A little something on the side – starting your own MicroISV”.  He quoted Joel Spolsky when he said an ISV is any software vendor other than Microsoft.  I didn’t know what to expect with this session, but it was very good.  It was interesting to see his take on starting your own software company.  There was great information in this talk and I’m glad I went to it.

Saturday Session 3

Lunch! The lunch was fantastic. There was BBQ and fixings. The food was great.  I had an excellent lunch conversation with Jennifer Marsman, Jason Rainwater, Gary Short, Wally McClure, Jim Wooley and a couple others.  It really was great getting to know others in the community better.  It was very cool to meet someone who actually worked on the .NET Framework back in the 1.0 days when I was first fooling with this stuff.

Saturday Session 4

Windows Phone 7 SeriesJames Ashley presented “Advanced Silverlight Development for the Phone” which talked about using Silverlight and Blend to create applications for Windows Phone 7. The talk was excellent with good information.  It didn’t quite go into advanced Silverlight like I had hoped but the discussion on Pivot and Panaramic was worth the time.  Another plus for attending this session was that I was able to meet Ben Henderson.

I just can’t wait for Windows Phone 7 to come out.  Being able to write code with the ease of Silverlight or XNA using a .NET language like C# to create great applications and games for a device like this is simply awesome.  I can’t wait!  Did I say that already?

Saturday Sessions 5 & 6

During my career, I’ve been called a mad scientist as a compliment.  In that same vein, Seth Juarez is truly a mad scientist. He had excellent information on Machine Learning for .NET.  Seth was a very enthusiastic speaker.  He had great information and was almost like a standup comedian up there.  It was very entertaining and very informative.

Seth created a .NET library at http://machine.codeplex.com/.  I highly encourage you to check it out to get some really cool code on artificial intelligence and machine learning.  By the time the second hour was over my head was literally hurting.  This wasn’t good because I had to present immediately following.

Saturday Session 7

I taught the Artificial Intellegence class and had decent turnout for the last class of the day.  Jennifer Marsman and Glen Gordon came by to listen to the talk which was a little intimidating but they both told me later they liked it.  I purposely ended 20 minutes early and left the floor open to questions.  I hated that I ran my first session over and didn’t have time for questions so I tried to make up for it here.  I figured if folks wanted me to dig into the code more then I would, but I got some great generic XNA questions by opening up the floor.

After my session I got Alan Steven’s home address so I could find his house later that night.  I then went back to hotel after stopping and getting some books for my family while I was out. Yeah, I’m a really bad gift giver.  I like books so I just assume my girls and my wife do.  They put up with me.  (Fortunately, they do actually like books. At least I think they do?)

PostStock

I almost said this was the best part of the conference, but it wasn’t actually part of the conference. Alan Stevens was awesome enough to open his home up to the community.  When I first arrived, I spotted Michael Eaton who had the first session of the day about going independent. I was able to pick his brain for about 30 minutes.  I really didn’t mean to monopolize on his time like that, but I learned a ton more during that time and I’m grateful he spent the time talking with me.

Michael Eaton and myself talking at PostStock

After chatting with Michael, I was able to chat with Dane Morgridge, G. Andrew Duthie, Joel Cochran and Glenn Gordon in the living room some more before heading outside.  The conversations went from talking about 100 billion hotdog awesome to the Princess Bride and even technical topics like Continuous Integration and source control.

Chatting on the front porch at PostStock Outside I was able to connect with Jennifer Marsman, Glen Gordon, Alan Stevens, Steve Andrews, Michael Neel and his better half Cicelie, G. Andrew Duthie, Robert Cain, Nick Riggs,Aaron Erickson, Ben Henderson, and Jim Wooley.  The majority of my time at the Stevens household was spent on their front porch talking with these incredibly driven people.  There was some technical discussion, but most of discussion was around how to get other developers involved in the community.  There was opinions on if every developer should be involved in the community or not. I believe everyone would benefit from being a part of the community. If you go to user groups or code camps or conferences like this you will become more engaged.  You will see the things you know that you may assume everyone does, but don’t.  You will definitely learn things you had no idea about. You will be able to build relationships with folks who have the same interest as you and can actually talk the same language.  I think the benefits are enormous, but it does take a time (and sometimes money) commitment to attend these gatherings.  I think it is worth it, obviously.

Once Steve Andrews found out there was wood in the fire pit, he disappeared.  A little later we all moved around the fire Steve got going.  Mind you, it was still 90 some degrees outside even though it was close to midnight. I think the fire actually dried the air or something because it actually wasn’t as miserable as I figured it would be. Who would have thought that hanging around a fire in the middle of summer would actually be comfortable.  Around this time, Alan brought out his guitar and we sat around the fire listening to Alan and Steve play the guitars with Glen singing.  The highlight of this time was definitely them singing Jonathan Coulton‘s Code Monkey.  I called it a night at 2:30 since I was driving home the next day.

Alan Stevens playing and singing at PostStock

General Comments

I just wanted to point out some items I didn’t already mention.  I really liked the venue.  It was fantastic. I think I’ll need to spend time in Open Spaces at future conferences / Code Camps to talk about XNA with others. I enjoyed all of the sessions but there is so much to learn and share in a more intimate setting.

I really liked the fact that keynote was at the end of the first night instead of in the morning like most conferences.  However, the only thing I would change about CodeStock would be adding a Kick-Off meeting at the very beginning of the conference.  Open Spaces may have suffered the first day because there was no announcement, but I imagine that Open Spaces suffered most just because of all of the great session options that existed. Base off of the connections I made at CodeStock this year and the quality of the conversations, I definitely plan on attending Open Spaces in future events I attend.

I’m also grateful for all of the sponsors for CodeStock.  Folks like Wintellect, DevExpress, TechSmith, Microsoft Silverlight, Telerik, Cadre5 ,  the main partner – Recruitwise, and plenty of others. These sponsors basically paid for half of the price of the ticket.

Obviously a huge shout out goes to Michael Neel (@ViNull) who put on a really wonderful conference.  I’m sure he didn’t do it all by himself, but even leading an effort like this is huge much less actually doing most of the work as well.  Truly, kudos to you my friend for putting on an awesome conference!

Michael Neel at Code Stock 

It took me a while to create this post. There was a lot of sessions and I had a really good time.  Such a good time in fact as to this is why I brought this site to life. I needed a place to put down my experience.  Hopefully this reminds you of the great time you had at CodeStock, or encourages you to go to CodeStock next year!

I want to thank Alan Barber and Jason Follas for letting me use their photos in this blog post.  I’ve put the photos on my server, but each picture should link to the original image.

Chad Carter 5 Comments