What a doozy of a day. Let me just get this over.
I was up early this morning and arrived at Kalahari Resort around 6:45am - just in time to make the breakfast buffet. The meal was spectacular as usual: endless scrambled eggs, bacon, potatoes, and other food filled me up only as well as a CodeMash breakfast can.
The 8:15am keynote speaker, Ted Newart, was a bit slow to start, but ultimately ramped up into an impressive talk about the virtues of individual programmers remaining in command of their own work, even in the face of a huge enterprise environment.
The first official session block of CodeMash kicked off at 9:45am, and I quickly got settled into "It's the Little Things" by Brad Colbow. The session focused on what makes good UX rather than how to make good UX. He presented lots of example of bad UX and UI, and while I did not learn any direct new knowledge from this session, I do feel like I can judge my own apps' UX much better than before.
The second session, at 11:00am, was "Introduction to Android Development" by Chris Risner. This was literally Android Dev 101, covering the very basics of the Android stack, including Activities, Intents, and Broadcast Receivers. I found the session informative but more of a review of the basics I already know.
Lunch was just after noon, and it too was pretty good, consisting entirely of Mexican-themed food.
The third session, "Hands-On Responsive and Adaptive Web Design" by Ben Callahan at 1:45pm was the highlight of my day. This session dove right into designing proper fluid HTML layouts using little more than clever CSS. I want to become an expert on fluid and reactive web design in 2012, and this session was a fantastic way to kick off this goal.
My fourth session, "Organized JavaScript with Backbone.js" by Joe Fiorini at 3:35pm was an all-code demonstration of how to potentially organized a large JS codebase within the MVC-style framework of Backbone.js. While the content was worthwhile, the speaker did not exactly enthuse or engage the audience. I found myself bored with the presentation pretty quickly, although I stayed for the whole thing just to take in what Backbone.js is all about.
I skipped the fifth session in favor of exploring Kalahari and practicing some of what I learned. I am really pumped about studying and practicing reactive web design.
Dinner was a delicious mix of meats, fish, salad, and dessert. Shortly after dinner, CodeMash's Pecha Kucha sessions fired up and entertained quite well. I hung around afterwards to work on some programming and attempt a few meet and greets, but everyone was pretty well distracted and scattered.
I am looking forward to a short third day of CodeMash. Assuming the weather does not derail my plans, I will be departing Sandusky around 4:00pm tomorrow to return to Perrysburg for a busy night in Toledo.
After that, an emergency Reboot Weekend will be effective Friday night after the concert, as I have a ton of shit to process and ponder. 2012 is off to a fantastic, if somewhat rocky, start. More to come.
B3 out.
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