Monday, June 1, 2009

Chicago Code Camp - reflections

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/chicago_code_camp__reflections.htm]

This weekend the LCNUG and Alt.Net groups hosted a very successful Chicago Code Camp at the College of Lake County in IL. We had about 150 people, 30 speakers, and a lot of knowledge transfer. I was privileged to be part of the group that helped facilitate it. We're in the process of trying to put speaker ppts and code samples up on the website.

Some misc reflections:

How did we make that massively awesome code camp website? We maintained it in ASP.Net, used xml files for the abstracts and speaker bios, and then had an automatic tool take screen scrapes of all the generated aspx pages. This saved the results as html files, which could then easily be xcopy-deployed to any FTP server without worrying about a backend data store or server-side support.

Did you have enough volunteers? I think in the end yes. People stepped up at the spur of the moment. I especially was impressed with how easy it was to move tables when you have 150 people. For lunch and cleanup, we needed to transport a lot of tables and boxes, and random people kept jumping in to help. What a great community!

Sounds great, but too bad I missed it. While we hope to get the ppt  slides up soon, also consider checking out the blogs of the speakers. Even if the blog isn't explicitly listed, you can probably find it by googling the speaker name and adding the ".net" or "developer" keyword to the search.

What's next? Stay in touch with the Chicagoland community. Perhaps subscribe to some of the speaker blogs, or visit the LCNUG, ALT.Net, or any of the other user groups.

See also: 10 Reasons to attend the Chicago Code Camp, Sessions up.

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