This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by James Britt.
Original Post: Desert Code Camp Follow-up II
Feed Title: James Britt: Ruby Development
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/JamesBritt-Home
Feed Description: James Britt: Playing with better toys
About when I was going home it occurred to me that, in the entire day, I only saw one actual full-on presentation (Naum’s JQuery UI session). What’s interesting is that it didn’t occur to me sooner, because I was having a good time.
I gave a session at 9am, then saw Naum’s thing, then wanted to catch the MongoDB session, but the speaker never showed. However, the assembled did some self-organizing and we had lightning talks instead. It was great.
Then it was lunch, and then I went to learn about Node.js, only to find that the speaker was some person who was supposed to talk about MongoDB, and still MIA. This time I gave an impromptu show-and-tell of my Lilypad Arduino + Bluetooth + Android setup (though pretty much everyone had left the room by then to go watch laser stuff).
And then it was time for my next session, an intro to Ruby. When that ended it was just about the end of the day. None of the remaining presentations in that final hour looked compelling, I felt like I had a full day, and headed out.
I then discovered, as I was sorting out crap in my car preparing for the drive home, that I left my coffee thermos in one of the class rooms. Today I bought some Styrofoam cups and caps to keep in the car so that I can avoid ever taking the travel thermos out of the vehicle (except back into my house). BTW, the themos is quite slick, and the only one I’ve seen that is both spill-resistant and can be easily operated with one hand. Luckily, once I found a place that carried them, I bought a few, so I had two in kitchen cupboard. Lessons learned: redundancy is good, and plan for failure.
Another interesting observation: I had more people for the Haskell intro than for the Ruby session. The difference was not great, maybe a few more in the Haskell group, but still interesting. Feeling I get from some casual conversation is that people are increasingly getting hip to the power of pure functional programming and the pitfalls of OOP. They may not go learn Haskell, but they’re looking at it, and Scala and Clojure as well.
During the ride home I was thinking about the DCC format. I had a great time, but still was a bit bummed that I could not see David Koontz talk on Unity, or Remi talk about Chrome extensions. The schedule is more wide than deep. That is, there may be 10 things going on at once, while the number of time slots is no more than six. I would like to see shorter sessions times (40 minutes perhaps, maybe less), and fewer “tracks”, but have the day run until 6pm. You would then have fewer possible conflicts for your schedule, and get to see more sessions overall. I’d also like to see time set aside for lightning talks, too.
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