Codemash – Like School, But With More Treats
Codemash is an amazing community conference held each year in Sandusky, Ohio. This year, like last year, I was lucky enough to get a paper selected for inclusion in the conference, so Rachel and I duly headed out to the good ‘ol US of A. There were some amazing talks being given this year so I count myself as very fortunate to have my talk on Asymptotics and Algorithms accepted.
Of course Codemash isn’t all about the talks prepared for the day, there are also a great number of ad hoc talks, or openspaces, organised on the day, by the attendees themselves, these are on subjects as diverse as agile processes and Dr. Who.
But Codemash isn’t even all about the technology. Codemash, uniquely amongst conferences, is inclusive of families, there is even a section for children called Kidzmash. Indeed, that is where the section title above came from. I overheard one young lad ask his dad what he did at these conference, and the dad replied that he went into the rooms and was taught about all the new technology, he said that Codemash was just like school, but with more treats, as it turns out, I couldn’t agree more.
User Group Tour
Of course, Rachel and I couldn’t go all the way out there without visiting some of our good friends in the area, and so we pitched up at a number of local user groups. We started at the Ann Arbor user group where I spoke about Technical Debt. We followed that up with a visit to the Commercial Users of Functional Programming where I spoke to them about Computation Expressions and Monads. My favourite talk was up next when I spoke to the North West Ohio .Net User Group about Data Mining the Social Web. The penultimate talk on the tour was at the Great Lakes Area .Net User Group where I spoke about Refactoring. Whilst I was doing that, Rachel popped off to speak at the very first Michigan Girl Geek Dinner, by all accounts she was a great hit. Last up was the Greater Lansing User Group where I spoke on the topic of Why You Suck At Design Patterns.
Hanging Out With Friends
On our last day in Michigan we hung out with our good friends at GravityWorks. Gravity Works Design & Development is a full-service website design and development company in Old Town, Lansing, our good friends Amelia Marschall and Jeff McWherter, have developed dozens of websites together. They also run a coworking space called SecondGear, where they were gracious enough to allow Rachel and I to hang out and work on the last day whilst we were waiting to leave for our flight. I can tell you the space is amazing and if you are in the area you should definitely check it out.
All and all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable trip, made especially so by all the cool people we met on the way, so I’d like to say a great big thank you to you all. 
Picture Credits
http://www.flickr.com/photos/betsyweber/
http://www.migang.org