Finally recovering from code camp. It was a lot of work even though there were a lot of people involved in organizing and executing it. Extra kudos to Rob Hale. I would have self-combusted if I had had to do this on my own which is what it has looked like every time I have tried to get some interest in hosting a code camp in Vermont. Rob is a great organizer so I didn’t have to worry about things like creating wiki sites for the committee to communicate etc. I got to play Carol Merrell to his Bob Barker, working a lot in the background leveraging the contacts I have built up over the years. The funny part was that while it took a while to put the schedule together, it took even longer to make it look pretty. Rob took on the job of front man on Saturday and did a fantastic job of it as has been noted by many.

Rob has written a great blog post on the event as well and most importantly, he’s already gone and found all of the links to many of the people that need thanking.

I do want to add our supporters again:

• Breakfast: Coffee and bagels/pastries sponsored by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. GMCR is hiring and their HR person will be there!
• Lunch: Lunch is sponsored by MyWebGrocer. Guess who else is growing! You can find Rob Hale if you want to learn about what a great place it is to work.
• Afternoon Snacks: Yes snacks. Cookies, brownies and even veggies & dip (aka crudités) is being provided by Microsoft.

• O'Reilly Media & Pearson (A-W, Sams & more), Wiley/Wrox and David & Julie Yack for providing books
• telerik, DevExpress, TechSmith, Balsamiq & JetBrains for software licenses & swag
• Pluralsight for Pluralsight On-Demand! trials for all attendees plus a one year subscription to raffle
• aspNetPro and CODE for magazines

There were 18 speakers and 19 sessions. If you are practicing your math then yes, one speaker did two sessions – Steve Andrews.

Alison Gianotto – Drove up from NYC to do her talk. It was fun having her as a guest at my house.
Andrew Sibley – Part of a team of studnets at Vermont TEch who presented an awesome online XNA game they developed.
Bradley Holt – Co-leads the local PHP group, was part of the code camp committee and did a great architecture talk
Bryan Tuttle  - Drove up from NH to do his talk on Joomla. He’ll be at Waltham Code Camp in a few weeks.
Christian Coté – Drove down from Quebec to do his SQL talk. What a guy!
Christopher DeGuise  - local VTdotNET user group member who is definitely an uber geek.
Dave Burke – what can I say about my buddy Dave. Believe it or not, he was part of the open source track!
Dennis Perlot – Dennis and his wife came up from CT and made a weekend of it. I got some great medical advice from his wife, too! :)
Eric De Carufel – Eric spoke at a recent VTdotNET meeting. He drove down from Montreal again to enlighten more folks on Parallel programming.
John Bowen – Another road tripper. John came from Mass to talk about Blend & XAML
John Garland – Yet another person driving from Mass (or was that NH?). John did one of two Silverlight 3 talks.
Josh Sled – Josh runs the local UNIX group and gave a talk on Django. Josh is also quite the MySQL expert.
Phil Denoncourt – I know Phil from the Boston .NET community. He drove up to speak and brought his son with him.
Richard Martin – Rick is a VTdotNET member who works at Springer-Miller in Stowe and gets to wrok with a lot of bleeding edge technology
Sergei Serdyuk – Sergie is a Ruby on Rails expert who runs the local Ruby group. He was very inspired by attendance in his talk and it looks like the Ruby group is going to start up again.
Steve Andrews – Steve made this code camp part of a multi-week road trip. He was actually at his brother’s wedding on Friday, drove to Vermont that night (arrived at my house at 2am) and was able to do his first of two talks at 10:30 am and did his usual awesome job. Steve is also a Microsoft MVP and INETA speaker. We were happy that Steve hung out at my house and had a little vacation for a few days (5!) after the code camp.
Tom Cooley – Tom is another long-time VTdotNET member. He did a talk on SOLID app design and I heard some great comments about it afterwards.
Slava Kokaev – I was so excited to introduce Slava to Sergei since they both originally come from Russia. :) Slava also came up from Mass to do his talk on Business Analysis with SSAS.

We had 85 attendees and everyone I talked to had just wonderful things to say about the sessions they attended.

Marlena Farnham from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters went above and beyond. Not only did she deliver gobs of coffee and treats for breakfast but she hung around most of the day helping out. I also know she got to talk to a few people about job openings that that was great for her and attendees.

Our D.E.s Chris Bowen and Jim O’Neil also came up from Mass for the event. This is also above and beyond in my mind and I am especially grateful.

Because I’m not a big road tripper – I was blown away by the folks who trekked to VErmont, attended or did a talk, and then drove home all on the same day from places like Quebec, Mass, Connecticut and New Hampshire.

Bradley, Matthew and I started talking on Saturday about puling off the next even that I have been dreaming of for many years. One day, one room, intro talks on each of the many different tech stack that is represented in our community - .NET, Ruby, PHP and so many others. The idea is that developers could spend the day getting an idea of what all of those other technologies look like. A glimpse at the code and teh tools used as well as the pros and cons.

Until then…ummm…yeah back to work. :) And when I’m feeling ambitious I will return and put more links in here.