Toronto Code Camp Live Blog

Derek and I are attending the Toronto Code Camp event, held at the York campus today.  The official link to the conference’s website can be found http://torontocodecamp.net/

The conference offers an impressive agenda of over 30+ seminars on various Microsoft technologies, everything from XNA on Windows 7 Mobile to SCRUM with VB.  Sounds like a good opportunity to dive into some Microsoft tech, so I’m going to be updating this post with some thoughts and insights, with a future followup on stuff I learned.

Read on for the full log of our day at Toronto Code Camp 2010…

5:17 Closing thoughts from Derek:

- James, you just surfed Reddit all day long man!

- you know, are these guys unemployed?

- some of these people look like they’re coming here as an excuse to get away from the wife and kids on the weekends

Closing thoughts from Jama:

- man, we’re a lot more 1337 than we think

- I need some facebalm man

5:14 Presentation is winding down to the Q&A session.  Its been a long day with lots of facepalming

5:04 RIM rep claims that JS doesnt run slow on BB, I beg to differ

4:53 Who uses Visual Studio as their dev environment? *90% of the room puts up their hands

Who uses Eclipse?  Me + Derek put up our hands, lol

4:35 Cool, he’s using his BB to control his powerpoint presentation

4:26 Last session, blackberry web development

4:09 And that’s all for now folks, no more HTML5

4:03 For each feature that he talks about in HTML5, he spends another 15min explaining how IE horribly fails at it, and at some possible js hax to help it out

3:42 I know I shouldn’t be bashing people for asking questions, but seriously, why ask about Acid3 tests when talking about HTML5?  Acid deals with css

3.39 Still talking about browsers. Someone mentioned JAWs.  I suddenly imagined my screen resolution dropping down to 480 x 300 with 8-bit colour

3:20 Obligatory XKCD reference here: http://xkcd.com/285/

3:18 WTFBBQ, presenter just put up an arbitrary chart used to compare Flash, Silverlight and HTML5.  I say, [citation needed]

3:10 Full house for the HTML 5 talk

3:09 It appears that everyone EXCEPT Derek and myself know about Telerik

2:52 My thoughts on their chairs: cushy chairs, but no lean-back chairs a la BA

2:43 I didn’t realize that there was such a thing as “fear of javascript”.  I wonder if there’s a JQuery Plugin for that

2:35 Terms like “callback functions” seem to be causing a lot of confusion

2:34 Its kinda scary how a large percentage of the people here are actually surprised at the prospects of using JSON for AJAX requests.

2:18 Note to self: thank Karen Reid for her awesome csc309 course, for teaching good practices.

2:10 I’m deeply disturbed by the fact that the speaker keeps insisting “you must know Javascript”.  Its AJAX!  A. J. A. X! Asynchronous javascript and XML.  Why the hell would you not know javascript?

2:07 Derek and I feel unusually smart at the moment.  Turns out we’re already running “optimized” AJAX

1:52 Turns out I’ve been doing AJAX the easy way (with JQuery)

1:45 The speaker just had to remind everyone to use FireBug as a part of their web dev workflow. WTF someone actually just asked “Excuse me, what is Firebug?”  That guy is gonna shit his pants when he finds out what it really is

1:39 Looking good so far.  Good speaker, and the guy certainly knows his stuff

1:12 Finished lunch at Quiznos.  Armed with a box of 20 timbits, we’re ready for the next session:  Optimizing Ajax for Maximum Performance

12:13 I am literally bored to tears.  I can’t believe that they made game development so damn boring.  This guys writes some pretty terrible code too

11:59 I’ve totally lost all interest by now.  Craving lunch.  This guy is walking us through the code in the most retarded way possible: line by line.  Yawn

11:40 oh god, it gets even better, inside the if statement, there’s a switch statement with 3 clauses.  His tabs go so far out that he probably breaks the 80 char rule before he writes any real logic

11:38 goddamn, I’m no game developer but something tells me that you’re doing something wrong if you have an IF statement with a TRIPLE-NESTED FOR LOOP that has another IF statement inside of it.

11:29 The guy is indecisive about putting his source up.  He’s worried that we’re going to steal is awesome game and release it for ourselves.  I can’t help but to think back on a talk from Intelliware’s CEO: Nobody cares

11:26 Man, this guy is just ranting about frames.  He’s got enthusiasm, I’ll give him that

11:00 session 2 time, XNA!

10:33 WinMo7 uses the “Metro Principles” of Clean Light, Open, and Fast.  The TorontoCodeCamp webpage designers should’ve kept that in mine before they put in animated GIFs to advertise their ‘after party”

10:31 Lots of broken demos going on today with the WinMo7 demo apps.  I guess its still a new tech.  Even the emulator is kinda wonky apparently

10:27 No multi-tasking, threads are put on pause on app switches.  The proposed solution was the throw the jobs into the cloud.  Sounds like a good plan but who’s going to pay for all that cloud processing time?

10:10 I just realized that the weirdo who walked in with an accordian strapped to his back was the accordion guy Joey Devilla via http://www.joeydevilla.com/about/

10:21 WinMo7 UI looks cool, but it doesn’t look like there’s a whole boatload of phones that’ll run it.  And while it is impressive, it doesn’t really wow me.  I guess its pretty hard when WinMo has built up such a bad rep over the years.  Plus, you’re playing catchup with the giants like Android and OS X.

10:00 Holy crap this isn’t very noob friendly, looks like there’s a lot of technologies working together.  The UI for WinoMo 7 looks surprisingly slick though

9:47 Talk has started, sounds good so far

9:35 Ditched the keynote to get a good spot for the first seminar “Developing for the Third Screen Windows Phone 7″.  Here’s a wonderful quote: “Most people think that Open Source is anti-microsoft.  Here’s the secret that they don’t want you to know: Open Source test their software on Windows first! “  What. The…../facebalm

9:28 Jesus, they have a seminar called “Regular Expressions: The World’s Most Powerful Text Parsing Language”.  Seriously?  You’re at a conference like this and you need a seminar to teach you about regex?

9:26 I think this is the 3rd time that I can remember where the ThinkLight was actually useful.  Dark room, strange wifi key.  Speaker is now talking about meds for some reason.

9:24 The keynote speaker is going on about rotisserie chicken and lawyers.  Somehow this has something to do with software development.  I’m getting hungry.  Speaking of which, they have 1000 registrants but only 400 lunches.  I’d say WTFBBQ but that’d just make me more hungry

9:22 Keynote: Oh jesus.  Not a good impression of the event so far.  Walked into registration and got a bagful of advertisements.  No hard copy of the schedule, and no map.  That wouldn’t be so much of a problem if their rooms weren’t so spread out, and if their signs weren’t small as f*ck.  What’s worse is that they tell you to check online for an update schedule, too bad it refreshes like mad when you load the site on your blackberry.  Fuck me