mgroves

Day 2 of CodeMash is over. I can’t imagine a better conference for computer nerds, except maybe a hypothetical CodeMash which was a few days longer.

Today was the first “official” day, and so there were more sessions (which are shorter). I sat in on a Prototype/Scriptaculous session, which was odd because I’m a jQuery guy, and Leon spent a good amount of time praising jQuery. He also stuck it to ASP.NET AJAX, which I found interesting; he also said that it’s “going away” now that MS has officially adopted jQuery. MS says that both will coexist, but I think jQuery will cause it to become stale, if not completely go away.

I went to a PM-oriented “Three Ways to Improve Your Dev” process, which had some interesting ideas.

Venkat Subra..Subra…not-gonna-work-here-anymore delivered what can only be described as coding stand-up comedy, as he listed a half-dozen programming fallacies during the morning keynote. Mads Torgersen delivered a keynote on the future of .NET.

I spent the next two sessions in functional programming: 1) Erlang, and 2) a more general session covering Erlang, Scala, and a couple others (to go along with the F# I did lab yesterday). It was interesting to dig back into functional programming, but I don’t think it’s my bag of potato chips just yet.

Finally, I sat in on an Extension Methods for C# session, which I found worrisome: extension methods seem really dangerous to me, and I’m having a hard time seeing then being used well (outside the .NET framework itself). They are cool, and they can be useful, but they seem to fall into my “on error resume next” bucket for now.

I had dinner with Ali, and then I went to the cocktail party. I played a ton of Rock Band, and then I watched some real musicians pull some fantastic improv songs right out of thin air: lyrics, guitar, drums, everything.

I think CodeMash 2010 needs to be at least 1 day longer–I’m having a ton of fun and learning a lot.

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