{"id":12,"date":"2009-01-15T15:09:31","date_gmt":"2009-01-15T15:09:31","guid":{"rendered":"\/blogs\/benbarefield\/archive\/2009\/01\/15\/codemash-2009.aspx"},"modified":"2009-01-15T15:09:31","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T15:09:31","slug":"codemash-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/15\/codemash-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"CodeMash 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I went to my first CodeMash<\/a>.  It was a lot of fun and quite exhausting.  Since I didn’t have any experience with functional languages before CodeMash I decided to sit in on the talks about Erlang and the functional parts of Scala.  These languages had some pretty cool features; I especially liked the way they handle concurrent programming.  The sender\/receiver model is an interesting way to handle the problem, and a lot easier to wrap your mind around.<\/p>\n

I didn’t want to talk much about the content of CodeMash in this post, though.  Maybe I should have titled this “Conferences for newbies”:<\/p>\n

Selecting sessions
<\/strong>This is not the easiest thing to do when you don’t know what to expect.  The abstract gives some idea about what is going on in each session, but doesn’t tell you all the relevant information.  I chose many of mine, like I said, because I wanted to get some exposure to Functional programming.  I would suggest getting exposure to as much as you can, and this means selecting topics that you know nothing about, even if you don’t see immediate use in it.  Another SRT employee said that he selects sessions by going to the ones that sound the most boring; he learns the most by doing this.
It is also a good idea to try to find out who the really good speakers at the conference are, and go see them.  I went to a session that I was not planning on attending solely because I was told that the speaker was very good.  It turned out to be one of the best sessions I went to, and even though I won’t immediately use the information from it I will have the knowledge for when I do need it. 
Networking<\/strong>
Meet as many people as you can.  There is a lot of value in this.  I failed to do this, and regret it.  These people can teach you more than you can imagine.
Open Spaces<\/strong>
If the conference you are at has open spaces going on, go to one.  If this is your first time to experience an open space event, just walk into a random one.  It doesn’t matter what the topic is, you just need to go in and see it.  The Law of Two Feet says that you should leave if you are not contributing to or gaining anything from<\/em> the space; however, if it is your first open space, you will gain from just being there and seeing the process.  The biggest thing I regret from this conference is not having gone to  an Open Space.<\/p>\n

But, as stated by the rules of Open Spaces: “Whatever happened is the only thing that could have happened”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I went to my first CodeMash.  It was a lot of fun and quite exhausting.  Since I didn’t have any experience with functional languages before CodeMash I decided to sit in on the talks about Erlang and the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-codemash","category-conferences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benbarefield.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}