I went to my first code camp with Philly.NET this weekend, and was impressed with the variety of speakers and overall attendance. For as many great online resources as there are today, sometimes it’s much more effective to see new technologies and methods explained in person.
The quality and polish of the presentations varied, but were overall pretty good. Being a code camp, most quickly moved from slides to live code, writing and debugging on the fly while taking questions from the audience. As always, it was enlightening to see how other people write software, both in terms of style and the tools they choose to write better code faster.
One of the presentations I really liked was a pretty realistic example of taking a poorly organized, buggy application and refactoring it to be well-separated and testable. It also explained a number of concepts like dependency injection and inversion of control without immediately jumping into an associated, complex framework, which made them much clearer. The evolution of the code is available for download.
Another beneficial aspect was seeing a broader view of the industry and available technologies than you get working at a single company, where the view is often being narrowed by higher-level decisions. Much like with scrum, I realized that many companies and developers are struggling with the same issues and sometimes reinventing the wheel, but there are some exciting opportunities for progress.
