I saw someone mention on twitter a few weeks ago, about how they were intending to blog a review of a conference they were attending as well as each session they attended. I thought this was a really good idea, at that time I decided I was going to do the same thing starting with the Iowa Code Camp. So here it goes!
The day started with a nice drive down to Iowa City with some good developers/friends, two former coworkers and one of my co-leaders in CVINETA. We pulled up to Iowa Memorial Union and had to park on the top level of the only skyscraper in Iowa City, I swear we thought we were parking in the Tower of Babel;). After parking and locating the elevator, we made our way into the IMU and got checked into the Iowa code camp. After getting my bag of info I made my way to the food table to get a much needed breakfast, no way am I going to make it through a morning of sessions without stuffing my face full of food first(tasty donuts and different flavored bread).
Now that my belly was full I was ready to take in my morning sessions (I will review the sessions I attended below). There were a couple time slots in the ICC schedule that I just wasn’t sure which session I really wanted to see and the 1st session was one of those time slots. I ended up attending Dylan Moonfire’s - Zen and the Art of Coding Standards in the unfortunately named “Penn State” room, I attended this session because I have some strong opinions on coding standards and just wanted to get another point of view. For the 2nd session in the morning I went to one of the sessions I was looking most forward to at this years ICC, Jason Bock on Exceptional Development: Dealing with Exceptions in .Net. After the 2nd session it was lunch time (woohoo), after all the learning from the morning sessions I really needed to recharge and fill my belly again. As is a Code Camp standard we were supplied with sandwiches, by far this was the best setup for lunch that I’ve ever seen for a code camp and the food was really good as well. I’d give the lunch setup and organization two thumbs up. After lunch I started out attending Erik Lane’s - Up and Running with CruiseControl.Net, then Glenn Leifheit’s - I Need to Secure my Software, Now What?, and finally rounded out my afternoon with Donn Felker’s - Asp.Net MVC with the Spark View Engine.
Finally to round out my Iowa Code Camp trip, we all came back together for the always entertaining closing comments and prizes. As usual the organizers were loaded with some awesome prizes to give away and as usual I didn’t win anything, but this is always just one of the more enjoyable parts of any conference and the Iowa Code Camp guys put on an entertaining closing prize give away. I swear the organizers tour the country as a comedy troupe when they’re not spending their time in front of a computer. All in all I give this Iowa Code Camp 2 thumbs up, I would’ve given it an additional 5 stars but I didn’t win any prizes :(. One of the biggest things that crossed my mind when leaving the code camp was that I still cannot believe this is a free event, I would definitely pay ten’s of dollars, ok maybe hundreds :), to attend this type of event in the future. The only bad thing I could say about this event is that I wasn’t able to spend much time talking with others as much as I would’ve liked to, in the future I’m really hoping that I can make it to the after party of the Code Camp and get to spend time with my peers in a more relaxed and casual atmosphere. Finally I’d just like to thank the organizers of the Code Camp cause they’ve done an amazing job, and I wouldn’t expect anything less from the quality group of individuals who put this event together. Thank you and can keep up your amazing work.
Session Reviews:
Zen and the Art of Coding Standards - Dylan Moonfire I chose to attend this session because I’m a big believer in coding standards and feel they can make development easier and a lot less stressful, and getting the chance to hear someone else give an opinion is always a good thing. This was a really well put together presentation and was amazed at how many of the same ideas Dylan and I shared on coding standards. As the presentation went on, I couldn’t stop but think how closely Dylan’s and my ideas on coding standards mirrored those of Uncle Bob Martin. I got a majority of my ideas on coding standards from reading Uncle Bob’s book “Clean Code” and figured Dylan probably did as well. I ran into Dylan later in the day and was amazed to find out he had never heard of that book, and it just made me respect his presentation even more because he was able to come up with these standards through his own work experience. Coming away from the Code Camp I felt that my ideas on coding standards had only been strengthened by hearing Dylan’s presentation, and he gave some great ideas and tips on how to get coworkers to care about standards as well.
Exceptional Development: Dealing with Exceptions in .Net - Jason Bock This session was one of the sessions I was looking forward to the most at this ICC. First of all because I’ve seen Jason present before and he’s an amazing presenter and secondly I want to make sure I understand as much as I can about handling exceptions in my projects. Jason’s presentation did not disappoint one bit, he did an amazing job and gave some extremely useful information on exceptions that I had not come across before. To me this is one area of software you can not take for granted, because you’re only hurting yourself if you’re not properly dealing with exceptions. Jason gave some great advice and tips on how to make sure your logging/dealing with the proper exception. I took a lot of great things away from Jason’s presentation and made me realize you really need to think about how your going to handle exceptions and I hope to use what he taught me from now on.
Up and Running with CruiseControl.Net - Erik Lane I’ve followed Erik for awhile on Twitter and was really excited to see he was coming all the way from Colorado to present at ICC so I wasn’t going to miss this presentation. I also thought this topic would be very beneficial for me to use at work as well, since we don’t have CI server up and running yet. The presentation was very detailed and went into all the steps to setup CruiseControl.Net and did give me a some great ideas on how to use a CI server, but all the config sections seemed to be more then I really wanted to undertake to get a CI server setup. So when I setup my CI server I’ll probably using something a little easier to setup, probably something like TeamCity. But this was a great presentation, and I was able to chat with Erik a little more after the presentation on ways to get fellow developers to be more accepting of a CI server over looking the check-ins. It was also great to get the chance to meet Erik in person and look forward to chatting with him on Twitter more.
I Need to Secure my Software, Now What? - Glenn Leifheit This is a topic that I wish I could spend more time with personally. I was excited to see someone presenting on security at ICC, wish we could have had talks like this more in the past. The presentation was very good and covered some of the major risks that developers need to worry about when coding, and Glenn also listed and showed off a few of the tools that his company uses to search for vulnerabilities in their web applications. I thought the demo and listing of the tools to use for vulnerability testing was the best part of his presentation and I wrote many of them down (basically check out OWASP ). Hopefully in the future we’ll maybe see some presentations on defensive programming techniques or tips and tricks to prevent certain vulnerabilities in your code. I would love to see this type of presentation from the developers perspective.
ASP.NET MVC with the Spark View Engine - Donn Felker I have heard of Spark View Engine but hadn’t had the chance to do any work with it, and was really excited to see Donn was going to be presenting on it at ICC. Donn’s presentation was very good and covered a lot of details in spark, only down side in my opinion was that Donn seemed to really be rushed and I could tell it was because he had a ton of material to cover. I came away from this presentation just blown away at how easy writing code to be interpreted by a view engine could be, and how easy Spark made what could be difficult tasks just flow easily in your code. Coming away from this session I couldn’t wait to get home and download Spark and start working with it, and really can’t wait until intellisense is working for Spark in VS2010. I think Donn’s presentation just won me over to the Spark View Engine on my MVC apps.