CodeCamp 2010 = Awesome!

I spent the day on the Foothill College campus in Los Altos for the 2010 edition of the Silicon Valley Code Camp.
And I plan to return tomorrow!

We had a wonderful weather, lots of food-for-thought and abundance of pizzas.
And best of all, it’s all free thanks to the sponsors and an army of volunteers!

Sessions I attended

1. HTML5 Crash Course

Scott Stanfield did a very good job in getting me kick-started with the new stuff you have to know about HTML5. And lots of good references too (tools, sites,…). A good start!

2. The Science of Great UI

By the one and unique Mark Miller of previous Delphi fame, now with DevExpress on the .Net side of things. He really is an awesome presenter and the content is well nourished by years of experience and reflexion.

One of the key point, well above the rules, guidelines or recipes to build a good UI, is the method to move UI evaluation from subjective to objective.

The best session of the day for me.

3. 0 to 60 with Regular Expressions in 75 minutes

With the introduction of RegEx in Delphi XE, it’s a must to have the basics. That’s what it was all about. And I can tell you that Nima Dilmaghani did a very good job at feeding us the quirky syntax in a very lively and enjoyable way.

Great! So much better than with a book.

4. Fundamentals of Good UI Design

Too bad Uday Gajendar’s session came after Mark Miller’s brilliant one. It was good, but lacked the depth and vision, the formalization/abstraction introduced by Mark. But it was a good complement nevertheless.

I had one minor grip though, his slides were almost an example of what not to do, especially when applying the criteria we got from the morning session: a big blob of text, with a bad signal/noise ratio, words highlighted by colors that I could barely differentiate (no, I’m not color blind), low contrast… He also did the codecamp web site though, which is so much better, so he definitely knows his stuff.

5. In-depth Survey of HTML5 Features

It started a bit late due to some technical difficulties and it was the end of the day. Not the best thing for a session devoted mostly to see some HTML code. But Tab Atkins is a very engaging speaker and he knows his stuff in-and-out.

The title says it all, we dwelved into the new tags introduced in HTML5 with a lot of code samples. He did wonders fiddling with the canvas and video “a la mode” javascript. Funny, in a geeky perverse way…

And now? Delphi anyone?

Apart form going back there tomorrow for a somewhat lighter day, the question is about next year.

This is a community event and as such cannot be a hosting event for a sub-conference (see the FAQ), but it is all about code, for developers, by developers. So why not have some Delphi sessions, or even a Delphi track if they are plenty enough? I, for one, would be willing to do a session.

I believe that a good way to gain acceptance would be to have sessions where Delphi is the language used to illustrate or code a solution/domain, like my sessions on Speech applications, half of it is about the speech technology, the engine, the rest is Delphi (or Delphi Prism), not out of reach for C# developers…

It’s on a week-end, it’s free, but you’re on your own if you need travel and lodging.

So, what do you think? Would you like to attend (eh, it’s worth it anyway) and have some Delphi-ish topics? Would you like to speak?