Rachel Hawley's DevExpress Community Blog

January 2010 - Posts

• CodeMash 2010 over, gotta get me some CodeMash 2011

  It’s a unique developer event. It covers a vast range of topics. It attracts terrific community speakers. It’s held in Sandusky, OH in January … in a water park. Yes, that’s right, it’s held in a water park in the middle of winter. An indoor water park that is. Ladies and gentleman, I give you CodeMash. Jim Holmes, Jason Follas and the staff at the Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, OH did an incredible job of creating an very friendly, inclusive and yet vibrant event that catered to every type of developer, be you a networker extraordinaire or more the quiet type. Attendees had the pick of 7 different tracks with topics covering all manner of different development practices, platforms and languages. Speakers bought sessions on not just .NET but also the likes of Ruby, Java and Clojure. And if the session format was not quite your style, there was ample (and I really mean ample!) room for open spaces chats, mini breakout sessions and even a coding dojo available for you to meet with smaller groups of equally intrigued and enthused developers to learn more about what you were seeing in the sessions. On more than one occasion I happened upon Silverlight guru Jesse Liberty hanging out in the break out areas participating in various open spaces gatherings.  Another great part of CodeMash is its family-friendly nature. KidzMash offer all day activities to mini geeks, and with the resort being so family focussed and vast in its services this offers a great opportunity to bring your family and take some time out with activities to suit everyone – water park, spa, tech conference and a great atmosphere. The organizers put on a fantastic range of food and refreshments catering for a range of curious dietary needs, as well as bringing in the most innovative of attendee party guests that I have seen at a developer event. Enter the Haggis, a Canadian folk/rock/pop fusion band joined the attendees for a roof-raising evening at the attendee party mid-way through the event. These guys had bagpipes, I kid you not! They kicked off a phenomenal evening of festivities that ran into the small hours with new friends getting to know each other and old friends catching up. Gary and I spent our non-exhibiting time mingling with the attendees and meeting DevExpress customers and supporters. We looked on as Keith Elder talked to attendees about CodeRush, we let Jason Follas loose with our swag (we might let him help out again, he was a pretty good “booth babe”), and we traded drinks vouchers with new friends. I’d like to thank John Prideaux for being my buddy for the night on Thursday and enjoying a bit of Enter the Haggis music with me, while I left Gary to fight off the onslaught of Chris “Woody” Woodruff’s eye-wateringly strong Long island Iced Teas.         If you have been to this event you will know how truly fantastic it is. If you haven’t, I can only urge you to join the CodeMash Google Group and keep yourself up-to-date on the plans for the 2011 event. The 700 places for the 2010 event sold out in just 32 days. I have no doubt that 2011 will sell out in record time.   This event is like no other developer event you will attend. Do not miss out on your opportunity to experience it for yourself in 2011. I hope I’ll see you there! [Note: Alan Barber has some great shots of the 2010 event. Check out his photographs on Flickr.] Posted Jan 29 2010, 12:32 PM by Rachel Hawley (DevExpress) with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Community, Conferences, CodeMash

• Michigan: An educationally rich community for developers

  Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I have had terrible trouble getting back on board with the GMT time zone these past few days. To be honest, I was very much enjoying EST and all that Michigan had to offer … lack of sleep kinda makes me want to go back again! Gary and I have spent the past 2 weeks circumnavigating Michigan state and its surrounding area, visiting customers, attending user groups, catching up with DevExpress friends and attending the epic CodeMash conference in Sandusky, OH. It has been a non-stop rollercoaster trip that saw us cover almost 1400 miles in just 8 working days. I would like to send out a huge “thank you” to the organizers and attendees at West Michigan .NET User Group, Northwest Ohio .NET User Group and GLUGnet. These guys were so hospitable during our trip and helped us with an inordinate amount of stuff - getting us to and from the airport, finding local hotels, introducing us to their user groups – all the stuff that really makes or breaks a business trip! Michigan is an exceptionally fortunate state for developers. It has a huge amount of educational resources as well as willing participants that make it one of the richest developer communities I know. Off the top of my head I can think of at least six groups that can be easily reached from various towns in the state. That’s huge! Chris Woodruff, Jason Follas and Jeff McWherter are just some of the people who are helping to support a thriving developer community in this area by cross-pollinating their extensive community contacts and supporting each other’s endeavours month on month. If you aren’t a regular attendee of one of your local user groups or if you don’t know of one near you please do a quick search to see if you can find a group that meets near you. INETA offers a vast amount of information for developers and user groups alike, and there are certainly ways and means of finding groups near you for other development platforms that you might be interested in. The meetings put on by these groups are a great way to pick up information from interesting speakers, and, even better, they are also stuffed full of people from your area that could offer you advice, support, insights and maybe even job suggestions. If INETA can’t find one for you, then ask me and I’ll see what I can find! Developer-led groups and events are a fun, friendly and open way of meeting other developers in your area and networking (to whatever extent you want to) with people who are as similarly passionate about what they do as you are. Even I enjoy these meetings, especially when there are delicious cupcakes on offer (thanks to Betsy Weber at TechSmith!) And what is great about user group events is that they are completely free to attend. You get pizza, prizes and presentations all for free! What are you waiting for? Find your local user group! Posted Jan 25 2010, 04:16 PM by Rachel Hawley (DevExpress) with 1 comment(s)

• Codemash: An Interview with the Organizers

  Next week Gary and I embark on a perilous and snow storm ridden journey to London Heathrow … and then onto Michigan! We’re coming over the Atlantic to attend the developer event, CodeMash, in Sandusky, OH, as well as hopefully (weather permitting on both sides of the Atlantic!) taking the opportunity to meet up with some DevExpress customers and attend a few local user group sessions on the way. For those of you that have attended CodeMash in the past, you’ll be no stranger to the sell out event, held at an indoor waterpark, with an impressive list of community speakers. For those of your that have never been, get an idea of what Jim Holmes and Jason Follas have built into an incredible developer event over the past years  and mark your schedules with a plan to get involved in 2011. The interview is only about 20 minutes. Just click the play button on the mini-audio player here: You can also download the mp3 file to your iPod, Zune, or any other mp3 player by heading here: CodeMash_Organisers_Interview.mp3 Will we see you there? Posted Jan 08 2010, 01:00 PM by Mehul Harry (DevExpress) with 2 comment(s)