Philly Code Camp Wrap up

The second Philly Code Camp of the year was this past Saturday and it was a good one.  (I guess my experience tells me they are always "good ones", but it is worth stating that it was in fact good up front.)  Hats off to the Philly.NET crew.  They really do a fantastic job of putting a code camp together.  It was very well organized and really ran through without a hitch.

This was my first time speaking at a code camp and it was a very interesting experience.  While I thought I was ready to present when I arrived, my Macbook Pro, Vista, and the projector had other ideas.  Since I was first up, I was able to get into the room early and get setup.  If it were not for this extra time, my session would have been a disaster.  I wasted about 15 to 20 minutes trying to get the projector to work off my Boot Camp partition (booting directly into Vista) but it wasn't to be.  (And here I thought it would be my best bet.)  Anyway, I finally booted to the Mac OS, and run my presentation through Fusion.  It worked like a champ, but I had wasted the initial 10 minutes of the presentation.

It was a rough start and not exactly what I had planned, but after things settled down, all seemed to go well.  (Ok, I had no further technical difficulties and no one threw rotten vegetables at me.)  In reflection, there are lots of things I'd have changed, but it was all a great learning experience.  I'm sure I had too many uhs and umms, in the talk and I knew I rushed it a bit as I had planned a full agenda and was now working with a compressed time frame.  So it goes.

Beyond my session, I enjoyed a number of interesting sessions and had some nice conversations.  The sessions I attended were all very good and really showed the passion of the presenters.  These people made you want to dig further into the topic after you left the session which is the mark of success in my book.  I never seem to get to talk to all the people I had planned to, but I will admit that by the end of the day, I was exhausted and just ready to go home.  I think I'll make sure I'm better rested for next time.

If you came by looking for my code samples from the presentation.  I will make them available in the next day or so.  Sorry for the delay.