CodeMash 2011

It has been about a month since CodeMash has passed – there was good content and good discussions. Exactly what I hope to get out of CodeMash. I continue to think about some of the ideas and discussions; I have yet to decide on the merit and value of some of what was presented.

The first thing I want to do is poke the hornet’s nest. I’m not sure that "Craftsman" or "Journeyman" is the analogy that we want to use to describe ourselves. There are some valuable lessons that can be learned from the life of a tradesman, but I think there are important challenges that we have that cannot be addressed by the analogy. I’ve been trying to apply some of what I’ve learned in one of the "Software Craftsman" sessions and found that it doesn’t really line up with the real world.

I attended some very interesting sessions and learned some cool new stuff. I went to the Scala Koans session  by Dianne Marsh and Dan Hinoosa. Scala has some exceptionally strange syntax but seems like a very cool language. Carl Quinn’s talk about Netflix moving to Amazon Web Services was quite interesting. It was suprised me that he said the cost of the data center versus a cloud was "about on par". I would have expected the data center to be significantly more expensive, but I imagine NetFlix is using a huge number of EC2 machines. He also said that a rewrite of nearly all of their software was necessary because of the the cloud has man different considerations than a comany run data center. Joe Nuxoll’s talk on UX design was incredibly interesting and enlightening. It is both interesting and frustrating that UX design is a lot more about  feeling and emotion than development work is. It is very difficult to pin down what will make the user experience good, but we know many ways in which we can make our code good. While there are some guidelines to help with UX design, it is a much more amorphous process. One of the big messages here was that designers and developers need to work closely together to create an effective product. The other piece of advice that he gave that I thought was really good, but hard to convince management of, is that it is really valuable to create a lot of prototypes and abandon most of them.

Other parts of my CodeMash experience consisted of reinforcing behaviors that I had learned from previous CodeMash conferences or from solving problems throughout the year. While my first reaction to this was disappointment that there wasn’t some big new thing to learn, I ended up comforted in the knowledge that I have been doing things in what is currently considered the "right" way. As you get closer to the leading edge of practices and technology the small details become increasingly important. For example, one of the sessions I went to talked about techniques that I was already using, but using tools that I am not currently using. These tools sound very interesting and I will have to look into them when the opportunity arises.

I’d have to say my biggest disappointment of this year was that the weather prevented some speakers from arriving on time, so I was unable to go to some sessions that I was excited for.

My biggest win came in the poker tournament.