CodeMash: Day One

Day one of CodeMash is entering its final hours, and so far it has been a blast.

I started my trip on a bad note: I arrived at Kalahari Resort Wednesday evening around six, settled into my room (after wandering around lost for a half hour), and quickly realized that I forgot a whole bag of supplies at my apartment. My medication was among the items I left behind, so I rushed to find an alternative to driving home. Long story short, I am having a couple of extra pills delivered to me tonight.

Day One of CodeMash - today - has been fantastic. I atteneded four out of today's five sessions. My thoughts and comments on each are below.

jQuery 101

As the title suggests, this was an introduction to the basics of jQuery. Unlike past jQuery presentations I have attended, however, this was more trial-by-fire - we dove into code examples right away and kept on through to the end. There was very little new material for me in this session, but it was nice to review what I already knew.

Topics that were covered include jQuery's strengths, selector syntax, and DOM manipulation.

jQuery 102

This session continued where jQuery 101 left off. Introduced were intermediate jQuery concepts including advanced ID, class, and element selectors, the basics of jQuery UI, and the basic framework required to write a jQuery plug-in. I found this session extremely informative and interesting from front to back. A couple of technical snags provided some pleasant comic relief.

Meet Drupal: Make Powerful Websites Quickly

I had only heard of Drupal once or twice in the last ten years, so I was eager to learn about the platform. I was not as impressed with it as I thought I would be. Drupal is certainly a mature platform for rolling websites together, but it seems to be geared more for content managers than programmers, and unfortunately this presentation did not keep me interested until the end.

Three's Company: Writing For the Browser, the Desktop, and The Phone

This session should have came with a caveat: "Windows platforms only!" In all seriousness, I found this session neat in concept, but I was not terribly interested in the focus on Microsoft technologies. The focus was on using Silverlight-based technologies to develop code that is portable in some common form to all three platforms: the browser, desktop, and phone. At least the session was cut short due to tech errors.

Tonight is a mix of parties, music, swimming and - hopefully - meeting a lot of great people. Awesome.

B3 out.