If you weren't at Codestock this weekend, you totally missed out.
A few hundred developers from all over the country (Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, and I'm probably missing a few) got together for one of the most interesting technical community events I've ever had the privilege of attending and speaking at.
My employer, Magenic, sent me down to Knoxville for the weekend with a slide deck, some swag, and a mission. My presentation was on
XNA 2.0 and 3.0, my mission was to learn and also share my knowledge with others. I'm happy to say I accomplished both, and had a great time in the process.
The Codestock organizers did a fantastic job of putting together this event. I'm really looking forward to the next one.
My session went really well. The room was packed (I might even say we underestimated the demand) and I got lots of really good questions about
XNA 2.0 and 3.0 and what you can (and can not) currently do with each version. In addition to almost 30 slides, I did 4 brief demos and my session ran right up to the time limit, with about 30 seconds to spare. My laptops GPU can't hand the Race Game so I didn't get to show it off, but all the other demos went well.
When I wasn't in my session, I hung out in the Open Spaces room, run by Alan Stevens. Alan did a terrific job of getting the ball rolling (and getting out of the way afterwards) so the conversations could evolve on their own, as these things are intended to do. I really like this format and I fee like I learned quite a bit.
I spent some time playing with my HD Cam and managed to record most of one of the conversations that sprang up over lunch. The funny part is that this wasn't even a scheduled open spaces topic, it just evolved from the people sitting around eating their lunch and talking. It was quite possibly the best one of the day.
After CodeStock and an interesting dinner where the restaurant couldnt really accommodate all of us (~30 people) as a single group, so we split up into lots of small groups with mostly random people at each table... more interesting (mostly geeky) conversations followed!! That and the fact that Pandamonial kept sending beers to my table, made for quite an interesting time.
After the dinner, we all reconvened back at Alan Steven's house for a bonfire and some impromptu jams by various guitar playing geeks. There was also a geek poker tournament.
Quite a lot of fun for one day! I can only imagine the next one will be even better.