Code Camp

Seattle Code Camp v4.0

Yow-Hann Lee — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:06:19 GMT

Seattle Code Camp 2008 is once again held at the DigiPen campus. I never got around to recapping the one held earlier this year (v3.0) but have recaps of v2.0 here and here.

Check it out at: https://seattle.codecamp.us/default.aspx.

Seattle Code Camp 2007 (aka v3.0)

Yow-Hann Lee — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:48:50 GMT

Around this time last year, we were fast approaching the Seattle Code Camp held at Digipen in Redmond. Well, it turns out that it will be held in the same location this year on ~~November 3 & 4~~ ~~(edit: received an email from the organizer with updated dates. It will now be hold on Nov 17 & 18) (edit: received another email saying that this would be postponed to January sometime...TBD)~~ (edit v3: Seattle Code Camp V3 will happen on Jan 26 & 27, 2008)

This was a great event last year with strong emphasis on XNA last year as it was "the new hotness". You'll be able to find my blurbs about the event last year here and here (excerpt on IIS 7.0). This time last year, there were two main differences or missing ingredients. I actually didn't have a Vista box to run IIS 7.0 and the other being that I wasn't working at MySpace yet.

Anyways, go check out the Code Camp info at: http://seattle.codecamp.us/.

Bring your enthusiasm!

Useful Resources From VanTechFest

Yow-Hann Lee — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 12:11:00 GMT

Just wanted to share some neat resources I came across from this event:

Here is an ASP.NET ViewState Tool: http://www.binaryfortress.com/aspnet-viewstate-helper/ - (Yes, yet another one...)

Rhino Mock: www.ayende.com (Rhino Mocks 3.0 Beta can be found here: http://www.ayende.com/Blog/archive/2007/02/17/Rhino-Mocks-3.0-Beta-Released.aspx)

NOTE: I've found NMock's evolution in 2.0 means it is more restrictive (i.e. interfaces). Rhino Mocks looks like it could be a more promising mock object framework than NMock. The presentation definitely gave me more incentive to check out Rhino mocks and potentially move away from NMock.

Sample Issue Tracker using Workflow Foundation: http://www.habaneros.com/Presentations/2007/Feb24-2007-1.html

Microsoftee on State Machine Workflows: http://blogs.msdn.com/pravin_indurkar/archive/2005/09/25/473826.aspx

CLR Internals Presenter (mostly on SoS), Greg Young's blog: http://codebetter.com/blogs/gregyoung/default.aspx

Useful blog on Advanced .NET Debugging: http://dotnetdebug.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html

Website Optimization Analyzer: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Model Presentation vs. Presentation Gone Bad: A Retrospective View of VanTechFest

Yow-Hann Lee — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:51:00 GMT

Model Presentation:

The example for the model presentation is the one given by Richard Campbell and Kent Alstad on Scaling ASP.NET Applications. This may not be necessarily the best model in terms of delivery of technical content depending on what level and the type of projects the attendee has been on; but it was certainly a good example of a well-rounded presentation. The reason why I worded these things as "presentations" as opposed to something more interactive is because they are moreso speeches. Sure, the talk could have included some code samples and demo'ing in Visual Studio, but that wasn't the intended goal and it is after all called a TechFest as opposed to Code Camp =).

In any case, as I pointed out earlier, the presenters were very organized, focused on their area of expertise and knew how to interact with the crowd. By focusing on their area of expertise, they spoke from their own experiences and also did their homework. And because of this, they were able to provide some cool inexpensive (free) resources for calculating performance. Enter http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ for assistance in part of your performance equation calculation. And even though they weren't making an entrepreneurs sales pitch, they were definitely one of the better presenters at following Guy Kawasaki's Rules of PowerPoint.

The fact that Richard Campbell is a rock star in the .NET community may or may not help with the audience's perception of the presentation itself. It could help in the fact that it would draw a bigger crowd (compared to the crowds of other talks, I would so say). But the flip side of this is that the crowd may also come to expect more out of the famed (Greater) Vancouverite.

Presentation Gone Bad:

Just a quick disclaimer beforehand, the following is not meant to be offensive. It is rather intended to be an objective look at the post-mortem of a presentation. Some of the actual events for this "presentation gone bad" were a result of unfortunate circumstances. The following is intended to take away some of the things we can learn from other's misfortunes.

The presentation gone bad would be the Ruby Talk at the Vancouver Tech Fest. This was a promising talk as it was one of the few sessions that was aimed at unifying this into a tech fest as opposed to the traditional MS-backed Code Camp featuring only Microsoft Technologies. Also, for the last couple years, Ruby has been the hot poster child programming language of the open source world. Now, it was time to convince the norm folks from the Java and .NET camps of this. Well, evidence of this already began with converting John Lam, innovator of RubyCLR - Ruby for .NET, into a blue badge dude.

To start off the presentation, Nathaniel Brown experienced technical difficulties with hooking up his Mac. (Kind of puts of a damper on the whole "Mac, It just works!" motto eh?) At this moment, you may be recalling back to your college days. You know the one...the one where you had to do a demo of the term project and X% of your mark depended on it. And what do ya know? You come across a glitch during the demo that you've never encountered in test. Actually, for many and even for some of the best of them, this still happens in the real world. At this point, it all comes down to how you score in the recovery mode. So with Rob Chartier to the rescue, the presenter is able to get the presentations running on Rob's laptop.

Unfortunately, this was also where a questionable decision was made. He decided to download the famous Ruby demo on http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts, showing the making of a simplified weblog in 15 minutes. (NOTE: He had originally intended to code up his own "live" in 5 minutes). The reason why this is questionable is because for some, myself included, they have already gone through the screencasts and installed Ruby on Rails. I suppose part of the problem stems from the fact that the agenda only stated "Nathaniel on Ruby", making it difficult to determine what level this was for. In any case, showing a video of other's work in his own presentation did not prove to be a hit. For one, the font was way too small as it was being replayed in QuickTime. Secondly, people coming to a talk are expecting to see original content made by the expert speaker.

He was speaking in front of a primarily Java and .NET crowd. Once he realized the presentation could not go as planned, perhaps he could have modified the talk so that it was more of an open panel discussion. This would allow for mutual flow of information. Unfortunately, he was not very convincing in pointing out advantages of Ruby. For the most part, his only convincing case was that he preferred the syntax which is a subjective thing. And unfortunately, when he referenced other languages, he could not draw much from his own experiences but still attempted to justify his opinions. For example, he stated that "Having worked with PHP since PHP3...PHP has some of the best documentation support amongst all languages". Unfortunately, this is a classic case of speaking on topics outside your areas of expertise. (At the beginning of the speech, the presenter highlighted how he really only has real work experience with PHP and Ruby). I can draw an analogy to Richard Campbell and Kent Alstad's talk on Scaling ASP.NET Apps. Much like an application, a language also needs time to scale and mature. And with that is the support and documentation. What does the scaling of a language encompass? Naturally, the adoption rate and industry backing goes hand in hand as well.

Comments coming from the crowd were that he was attempting to make assumptions on other languages without speaking from his own real world experiences. Perhaps a better approach would have been to state the obvious, "Use the right tools given the circumstances". Personally, I see Ruby and Ruby on Rails as a great tool when it comes to specific scenarios (i.e. rapid prototyping, small projects, automation testing).

Some very good lessons to learn from a "Presentation Gone Bad". Not only in terms of what to look out for when presenting, but also what to consider as a technical guy.

Come prepared and sort out technical difficulties beforehand.
Speak on topics within areas of your expertise ONLY (refer to point #1).
Have a backup plan (refer to point #1).
Know your limits on technical areas.

Well, it's always easier to analyze something in hindsight and at the expense of others. But you know how the old saying goes, "experience is just having made all the wrong decisions before". So, better to learn from another's "experiences".

Vancouver TechFest 2007 Summary

Yow-Hann Lee — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 05:12:00 GMT

Vancouver TechFest 2007 just wrapped up tonight. I posted about the Vancouver TechFest Feb 2007 (Formerly known as Vancouver Code Camp) and it was certainly a worthwhile event to attend. I will add more comments in my summary recap of this day once I gather my notes and settle down.

In the meantime, the highlight of the day was the fun talk given by Richard Campbell and Kent Alstad on Scaling ASP.NET applications. They were engaging, very organized, drew from their own experiences and also had pointers to useful websites. So far, the talks I've attended which involved the co-host of DotNetRocks never fail to disappoint. Meanwhile, what seemed to be a promising talk on Ruby by Nathaniel Brown was rather disappointing.

Although renamed, V2 of the "Vancouver Code Camp" was a bigger and better event than V1.

Follow up to January's Windows Live Search Mashup Day

Yow-Hann Lee — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 12:15:00 GMT

As a follow up to my previous blog entry on Live Search and Mashups, It looks like they've uploaded snippets of the January Mashup Day to on10. You can also find snippets of the first Search Mashup Day here. So the other day I was thinking it would be great to get your own dev team involved in this. There are companies that have their teams go on retreats (i.e. Marketing/Sales) or participate in other activities (sports) for team building experiences, etc. But for developers, this would be a great opportunity and technical setting to bring out both the creativity and passion in your teammates. It would offer something that is removed from your daily tasks. I suppose Google may have something in allocating 20% time for side projects (although, I'm not sure if they enforce group/teamwork for these projects); but their intent is also different. Their hope is that one of these projects will lay the groundwork for the next killer app, whereas this exercise would be primarily aimed at learning and seeing your teammates from a different light. I digress...

Anyway, in the video, Jon Pincus briefly mentions his BillG Review Experience in passing. There are quite a lot of documented stories on BillG Reviews (i.e. Joel On Software describes his experiences in the early 90s). Jon is the brainchild behind these Mashup Days along with volunteers. You can also find his blog on Live Spaces at: http://adastra-experience.spaces.live.com/. And if you wanted to get a bit more insight into his BillG Review Experience, he posted an entry back in December regarding this.

Vancouver TechFest Feb 2007 (Formerly known as Vancouver Code Camp)

Yow-Hann Lee — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 11:38:00 GMT

Even though I am now located in WA, I still intend on making the drive up to Vancouver for this event. I attended the original Vancouver Code Camp last year and I am looking forward to what there is to offer. Unlike the Seattle Code Camp (which was also well done), the event is one day as opposed to two. It is held at a local technology institute and I would recommend others to make the trek up north. Also, this year, they appear to be trying something out. The main page stresses individuals "not come to this event and expect all the presentations to focus just on Microsoft technologies. We strive to balance the content." Hence the title change.

Last year featured speakers such as Shaun Walker (DNN founder) and Mike Mason (author of Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion). A lasting impression in my head from last year was in a demonstration of how CruiseControl and custom code used to trigger off portable warning lights in the room whenever the automated build ran and failed. That's continuous integration!

Day 2 - Seattle Code Camp

Yow-Hann Lee — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:38:00 GMT

Day 1 - Seattle Code Camp

Yow-Hann Lee — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 05:36:00 GMT

This is the second time I have attended a citywide code camp. The first was back in Vancouver earlier this year at the inaugural Vancouver Code Camp. Preparation for the second annual event is already under way there. Seeing as the code camp was a blast, I didn't want to miss out on the one here in Redmond. This one is larger in terms of the number of speakers than the one held in Vancouver. Nevertheless, Medhat Elmasry did a great job with the code camp there and the .NET User Group in general. Since there is another day of code camp to go, I would recommend people out in the Vancouver area to make the 2.5 hour trip for Day 2 of Code Camp.

Onto the technologies...

I attended two sessions on XNA and one on IIS 7.0 (there are four timeslots you can attend, but I missed one to take my driver's written test). Because there were so many options to choose from in each timeslot, I'd be interested in reading feedback on what some of the other sessions were like.

IIS7

There weren't too many attendees for Brett Hill's talk. My guess would be that some people feel that it is too far down the road (at least a year) for them to start caring about. I was surprised to hear that the IIS team is a twenty person unit (some in the team don't have 100% of their time allocated for it) that falls under Scott Guthrie's reign.

An ex-coworker had pointed out www.iis.net a few months ago and commented on the lack of non-UI related changes. I suspected it was just more difficult to show off non-visual features and well, it is now a few months down the road now. It's analogous to how really cool features for IT Pros and developers in Vista are not as well publicized as the sexy UI improvements.

In any case, one of the most valuable things you can take away from this talk is CONTROL. IIS 6.0 and previous versions were basically black boxes. All requests went through a pipeline that IT pros and developers had no control over. Now, it is much more modular and you control what is included in the pipeline. Sounds like they have taken a chapter out of the open source world? (Apache...). In terms of configuration, they've taken it and merged it up with your web.config file in ASP.NET. And this applies to non-.NET apps as well. Think of the control it gives developers now and basically/hopefully moving to an xcopy approach for deployment (reduces communication/transfer of instructions to IT Ops or at least that is what I think their intention is?). One higher up from the website configuration level is IIS' applicationhost.config, just another xml file. And if you take it another level, imagine if each web server all pointed to a common master setting. Sounds like it would scale well.

Speaking of scaling, here are a couple fun marketing tidbits about IIS (albeit the RTM versions):

MySpace runs IIS - site sees approx 23 billion page views/month

According to a recent study, 54% of companies on the Fortune 1000 list use IIS.

XNA

Some really cool stuff presented. More on this later.....

One thing I would love to see in the Seattle Code Camp is for the presentation materials to be available for download. Right now, I don't see something on http://seattle.techevents.info for this. They may have done this last year and will do so after the code camp is over?

Seattle Code Camp (edit: at DigiPen (Redmond))

Yow-Hann Lee — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 06:32:00 GMT

I registered for the Seattle Code Camp and their official info is here. Being new to the Seattle Area, I had to track down the fact that the location (DeVry University) (edit - this is now at DigiPen - Redmond) is actually in a place called Federal Way. (In the two weeks that I've been here, I am only somewhat familiar with the Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond area) Unfortunately, while the site has a good list/lineup of presentations on Oct 28 & 29, there was no mention of the times when they would be held. I went to Jason Mauer's site as well and couldn't find any information about the time schedules. Does anyone have any information on this? (edit: Schedule is out now and can be seen at http://seattle.techevents.info/codecamp/2/agenda.a...)

(edit: Thanks to George for giving me the heads up on the location change)

5001 150th Ave NE
Redmond, WA 98052
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