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.]