Thanks to Christopher Grant for pointing out that CodeMash moved from #2 on Technorati’s search to #1:

Amazing! That kind of exposure can only be a good thing for this unique and wonderful conference.

And has been all day:

Only “Colbert Oreilly” is higher. A Midwestern developer conference beating out iPhone says something, I think.

Scott’s keynote on LINQ was very cool. The concept of using specific keywords for data access (the what not the how) is one of those things that when you see it, you ask why noone’s really done it before. I hope other languages and platforms really do pick it up and run with it.

After the keynote I headed to Lean Software Development presented by Mary Poppendieck, which was a great talk and very thought provoking. I look forward to reading some of the books she recommended and at least attempting to put some of the techniques described in practice.

Luckily Bill Wagner’s talk, an Introduction to Functional Programming, was in the same room so I got to just hang out while they set up for that. Bill’s talk was quite a compliment to Scott’s keynote. Bill really showed the power of the LINQ syntax when used against objects and while implementing lambdas. Very cool stuff, I really need to move away from .NET 1.1 as soon as possible.

After that was Lunch, where we got to see Drew Robbin’s first python program as they randomly selected the Blogging contest winner (twasn’t me). I’ve seen a couple people complain about the lunches, but for me it was more then good enough. If people really wanted a full blown meal there were restaurants in the resort. And if box lunches keep the price down, then I say change nothing!

Anywho, after lunch it was off to Neal Ford’s talk on The Productive Programmer. It was amusing to watch him drink coke out of a pepsi bottle, but the talk was very good. I was happy to see that I was already doing alot of the things he discussed (and can’t imagine people NOT doing), but there were alot of utilities and subtle tricks he brought up that I will be sure to use. I look forward to the book!

Then it was on to the last session of the conference (for me), Jim Holmes’ presentation on “Improving your testing with Open Source Testing Tools”. Lot’s of good stuff, and since I hadn’t really been introduced to unit testing and what not before, this talk was very interesting. Fortunately I was able to trade in the book I received at the end of mash giveaway for a book on C# and NUnit. Which should be useful.

Speaking of the end of CodeMash meeting, I ended up coming in second place in Pillar’s CodeOff challenge. I’m sure I’ll put the gift card to full use. The object was to move a company of 100 employees from a building of four floors to a building of six floors while minimizing costs and keeping product teams together. My entry is here, if you’re interested.

We also got to see Brian Prince and Josh Holmes shave their heads! That was exciting, even though we didn’t quite get 500 blog posts in the time allotted, I think we did pretty good and Brian and Josh were awesome about it (I hope Brian’s wife forgives him!).

I must say this was a very awesome experience and I would have never met the people I met or learned the things I learned anywhere else. Thank you for all the organizers for putting on such a great conference, and for just being cool people and to all the speakers I heard and had the honor of hanging out with (even though I’m just an annoying newb). I look very forward to CodeMash 2.0.08 and plan on being there!

Well, since I had to check out I’m now lugging my laptop around. So you’ll get some live blogging from CodeMash today! Yesterday’s dinner and after dinner was very cool. I got to meet the pyOraGeek herself, Catherine Devlin. We were both looking for the OpenSpace meeting on Social Networking but couldn’t end up finding it (the location on the post-it looked like it read “laguorauer”), so I ended up at Joe Brinkman’s OpenSpace on Open Source on .NET.

Joe’s get together was very well attended with a couple dozen people talking about GPL and tools and all kinds of Open Source goodness. After that it was pretty much hanging around in the great hall mingling. There is an amazing amount of talent at this conference and it’s been quite a humbling experience. I thought I had learned a lot, I’ve barely scratched the surface. One thing I have learned here is that I know nothing.

I had a chance last night to listen in while Neal Ford, Joe O’Brien, and two other gentlemen were talking Ruby, Java, and Macs. I must say the level of talent was awe inspiring, I am now convinced that at some point in my life I must own a Mac. The opportunity to listen to people that were knowledgeable and passionate about some technology that I haven’t had a lot of exposure too was what I think CodeMash is all about. I had the pleasure of sitting in on that conversation until they turned the lights off in the hall around 11pm. We were the only group left there, and we took this as some sort of subtle hint.

After that I made my way to the bar, again, and not learning my lesson the other night I didn’t get back to my room until 1:30am. So at 1:30am, buzzing from the booze, I decided to work on my entry for Pillar’s CodeOff challenge. That kept my busy until 2:00am. I was able to get it done though, I did a little tweaking today at their booth and submitted my entry. Here’s hoping something good comes from it.

Anyway, I’m eating breakfast at the moment, waiting on Scott Guthrie’s keynote, and almost just choked to death on my minibagel. So I’m going to go and concentrate on eating before I kill myself.

Today’s been really interesting, a lot of good talks. I was out a bit late last night with some of the people from CodeMash, very cool group. I felt very inadequate being at the same table as some of those really smart guys and it was awesome of them to let me hang around. Luckily one of the guys there hadn’t eaten dinner yet either, and since organizing a conference endows the organizers with amazing powers, I was able to get dinner after the kitchen closed. So after stumbling to my room around 1:30am, I didn’t notice that the alarm clock was 12 hours off. Needless to say my alarm didn’t go off at 6:30 am like I expected. So I work up around 8:00am and had to rush to get down in time for breakfast.

Glad I did, Neal Ford’s keynote to kick off the day was awesome. Neal’s a great speaker and has a knack of making just about anything interesting. I then made my way to the fist session of the day, “Building and Deploying Smart Clients with Visual Studio 2005″, presented by Keith Elder. Very good stuff with a focus on Deployment, which is what I do. ClickOnce, and it’s automatic updating, should be quite useful.

Partially on the basis of Neal’s keynote, and partially because I’ve been curious for a while, the next session I decided to go to was “An Introduction to the Ruby language”, by Joe O’Brien. Joe pretty much convinced me that Ruby is the next language I will use. The flexibility is amazing, and as Neal mentioned in his keynote, the ability to create DSL’s is something that would help tremendously at my job where we do a lot of the same things over and over again and in ways where the base languages we use aren’t very good at expressing what we’re doing.

That brought us to Lunch, were we got to listen to Bruce Eckel’s keynote on the world being dynamic. Which was a very good, and very entertaining keynote. Though at times it seemed like an advertisement for Burning Man, mostly because at times there seemed to be a number of slides from Burning Man thrown in with no apparent relation to the subject. Bruce mentioned he had just reordered the deck, so that may have something to do with it. At times though, the effect of the Burning Man picture with the topic at hand was quite profound.

After lunch I got to go to “Beyond TDD”, presented by Ben Carey, all the Ruby guys were talking about test based development and talking down us compiler guys. Even though, as I told Joe, unit testing is just as important for compiled languages as interpreted. You can create a program that compiles that does nothing you expected. So anyway, Ben’s presentation was fairly good, and definitely worth seeing. His slide deck was awesomely put together and quite professional looking.

I didn’t get any pictures today because I wanted to really enjoy the sessions, I’ll probably have some from the dinner and attendee party though. So keep an eye out!

I’m taking a break from the last session before dinner to write this post and to relax. After dinner they’re having an Open Spaces meeting on Social Networking before the attendee party. I’m looking forward to that as I’ve just recently gotten involved in the social networking space. That’s all for now really, I’ll probably have another post up tonight (I don’t plan on staying out quite as late, unless someone offers to buy…..). Talk at y’all later!

Just got back from the expert panel on languages, it was most enjoyable. I think they did a pretty good job. I would say Bruce Eckle and Neal Ford pretty much stole the show, but everyone was very informative and entertaining. One of the interesting things I heard was the rise of Domain Specific Languages, something that’s been rattling around in the back of my head for work. The only real complaint so far is the wireless connection, it does to drop alot. For instance I’ve been fighting to upload pictures to flickr for almost a whole hour. Anyway, I’ve been taking pictures, here’s the flickr link. Feel free to tag ‘em up!

I’m here! I already had a chance to play the Nintendo Wii since I signed up to win one ;) I’ll be the guy taking pictures and posting them to flickr.

Well I’m just about ready to leave for CodeMash, next time you see me (and some of you will see me) it’ll be at the Kalahari. :)

Blake Ross pointed out that Rock The Vote is honoring the Good Dr. King by linking to a site which, under even a cursory examination, is obviously a hate site. This is a good lesson and reminder to always double check every thing you plan on posting before you blare it out on the net for all to see. Failing to do that may have cost one webmaster his job.

**UPDATE: 1/17/07@8:40am** Looks like they finally fixed their link. It now points to The King Center. Took them long enough. And one has to wonder…why didn’t they just do that in the first place?

24 this season so far as been as awesome as ever! And tonight’s episode…well..I don’t want to ruin it for anyone, but HOLY CRAP! But every time I see Ahmed, I think of Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.

In fairness, Kal Penn has done an amazing job, but I still half-expected Ahmed and Scott to light up a fat one…