MAD Code Camp 1 is in the books!

  • Article

Bagels and pastries: hundreds
Developers: 200
Sessions: 29
Pizzas: 25
Hours: 12
Tracks: 5

The experience: Priceless

I'm finally recovered enough from Mid-Atlantic Code Camp 1 to blog about it. What a day. I arrived at 7:40am to find that several people had arrived that early to make sure they'd get there on time (check-in started at 9am). Because of a last-minute flare-up of a foot problem, my friend and colleague Geoff Snowman wasn't able to join us, so I was doing some last-minute organizing of volunteers. Truth be told, though, the volunteers stepped up to organize themselves.

Eldon Seifert did an amazing job of coordinating check-in and registration, and he and Robin Edwards kept the food and drink flowing efficiently. Scott Lock took on the task of recruiting and assigning the room monitors who did a fantastic job of keeping all of the sessions on-time.

Michael Smith (who runs a local Cold Fusion user group, as well as the CFUnited conference at which Microsoft is sponsoring a track and yours truly will be doing a session on .net for CFMLers) brought some brightly-colored stickers to help quickly find speakers, volunteers, and user group leaders.

Victoria and Matt who staffed the front desk during the day, helped us find what we needed, and kept up with the clutter left behind by 200 people. Victoria in particular was a trouper, considering she had a nasty cold and had to be there at 8am.

And of course, an event like this wouldn't have been possible without all of the terrific speakers, folks who volunteered their time and knowledge to share with their peers (and on the day before Mother's Day, no less).

I'm very proud of the awesome developer community we have here in Mid-Atlantic, and the success of the first Mid-Atlantic Code Camp is truly a reflection of the talents and generosity of that community.

OK, so now that the thank yous are done, I know what some of you are thinking: Where's the stuff? Where can we get the slides and source code that we saw at Code Camp?

Funny you should ask...it's not every week that I get to launch two new sites, but such is the power of ASP.NET (and the apps built on top of it) that doing so was possible even with planning and working on Code Camp. At MAD Code Camp, I officially launched the Mid-Atlantic User Group Portal (kudos to Eric Meier of Charlottesville .net for getting the site hosting set up), where developers can find local user groups in the Mid-Atlantic district, and user group leaders can post their group information and events.

Today, I'm launching the Mid-Atlantic Code Camp site, which is using the Club Site starter kit for ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2. One cool thing about the new starter kits is that they install as new templates for Visual Studio, so you can easily create a new project based on the kit, then modify it to your heart's content. The other nice thing is that it can make launching a your site a matter of a couple of days' work, rather than weeks (or more).

The Mid-Atlantic Code Camp site now contains downloads and photos from Mid-Atlantic Code Camp 1 (note that I'm still awaiting slides and code for a couple of sessions...I'll post those as soon as I receive them). Moving forward, I'll be adding information on upcoming code camps, as well as downloads and pictures from each once they've been completed. If you have any suggestions for the site, they're certainly welcome.

UPDATE: Link to ugmidatlantic.com removed, as the domain is no longer under my control. If you have linked to this domain in the past, please remove those links from your site. Sorry for any inconvenience.