I’m posting a quick wrap up of the codemash conference I attended last week. This is mostly because I’ll forget things if I don’t, but also to let anyone reading know what they missed and they should look to attend next year.

The pros:

There was an enormous amount of talent in that one main ballroom. I think the final number was somewhere around 500 people attended, which seemed a perfect size for the venue. Frankly, it was just about a perfect size, period. I can’t imagine a conference being much larger and being able to be as effective, at least not in solely a two day period.

The session topics were fairly diverse, with talks touching on most of the major issues facing software developers of almost any persuasion. I’m not sure I saw any talks devoted specifically to perl or coldfusion, but there were talks focusing on .net, java, ruby, python, php, flex, as well as project management, individual programmer productivity, testing and QA, networking, and a few others which are already escaping my brain.

The cons:

I already mentioned to Jim Holmes (one of the organizers) that perhaps a third day wouldn’t have gone amiss. The drawback to having so much accumulated experience in one conference is that there was no easy way to decide which sessions to attend. Each session time block had 4, and sometimes 5, options to choose from. Adding an extra day and dropping the choices to 3 per time block would have reduced the ‘I couldn’t attend both sessions’ situation I found myself in (as did others I spoke with).

From a tech standpoint, the conference was a bit heavy on .NET sessions. Talking with Jim Holmes further, he said that the primary organizers are firstly .NET-oriented, and that there was some time constraints reaching out to other communities quickly. Given the org time, I’d say they did a good job, but would also say there’s room for some improvement next year in a few more sessions which aren’t specifically .NET-oriented.

This isn’t to say that I mind learning about .NET stuff – it’s comparatively the new kid on the block – but I had to balance. Dianne Marsh (was it Dianne?) challenged people to attend sessions outside their comfort zone. If you’re a .NET person, attend a Java session, etc. However, I had to balance that approach with hitting sessions which would do me some practical good in the day to day developer work I do, which meant php/scripting/java/testing/qa sessions.

Recordings – I recorded a few sessions on my own (just audio), but I do think that having dedicated recording facilities in each room, even if organized on a volunteer basis – would also be very invaluable. I would be willing to help organize that aspect of things at the next conference. Perhaps an audio disc or video DVD of *all* sessions could be sold. Discounted price if you attended, and a higher price for non-attendees. I think I would have easily spent $29 to get a set of DVDs with MPEG footage of all the sessions. $30 * 500 people would be $15000, which would likely cover the recording expenses, or come close anyway. $40 would make it $20000, which I think is what Jim said one of the recording quotes was. It might even be worth it to build in to the ticket price next year.

Open spaces concept. I missed the opening evening session, so I didn’t hear all the intro to this. However, while the idea is interesting, I didn’t hear enough promoting of the idea during the rest of the conference. Especially if this goes to three days next year (fingers crossed) I’d like to have seen more emphasis placed on the open spaces idea. Perhaps if there were more than 500 people, it would have grown more organically?

I’ve blogged ‘live’ notes from some of the sessions, and what I attended was worth the price of admission, no question. I think it was a fantastic conference by any stretch, and all the more so considering it was a first effort by this group. I’m definitely looking forward to attending next year, and to continue to keep up with some new and interesting people I met there.

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