Alright, I’ve put up two posts on the previous weekend’s Toronto Code Camp 2010 and I swear this will be the last one. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can check out the previous posts:
- Event live blogging: http://www.pioverpi.net/2010/05/01/toronto-code-camp-live-blog/
- Seminar notes: http://www.pioverpi.net/2010/05/03/notes-on-toronto-code-camp-2010/
I just wanted to finish of this series of posts with some of my thoughts on the event
Toronto Code Camp (TCC)
What I Liked:
- Its free! (Parking wasn’t but it was still a lot cheaper than parking at UofT)
- Nice location, big rooms, nice chairs
- Swag! You get a chance to win stuff at the end of each session! Some of the presenters had their own swag too. I got a Windows Azure t-shirt from some random event from the Fall of ’09. Not particularly relevant to the TCC but I’ll take it!
- Free wifi access throughout the event
What I Didn’t Like:
- No printed maps, no agenda, no warning. All we got was a bag-full of company-sponsored propaganda; which I don’t really mind since they paid for the event. But at least print off an black and white copy of the agenda for us; there’s over 30 seminars and I had no idea which ones I signed up for. I guess we were expected to print our own..
- Only 400 lunches. Okay, I’m not complaining that there weren’t enough lunches. Free event + free lunch = WIN in my books. But when you’ve got only 400 lunches for over 1000 registrants, well, maybe you shouldn’t have waited until the day before to tell people this. I think the lunch money would’ve been better spent on printed maps or funky badges. Personally, I wouldn’t mind paying an extra 5 or 10 bucks for the bag lunches that they were handing out. Plus, an earlier heads-up about the food situation would’ve been nice. I was lucky enough to have a car, so I was able to drive off-campus to find food. But if you weren’t able to go off-campus and you didn’t get a lunch, you’d be stuck gnawing on the free demo CDs.
- Between Derek and myself, we didn’t learn a goddamn thing. Well, okay, that’s a bit harsh. Every time I learned something new, Derek would tell me that he knew it already, and vice versa. The Windows Phone 7 talk was genuinely interesting, but the speaker (Mark Arteaga) got cut-short because of a long-running opening keynote. The HTML 5 talk was also interesting, but each cool feature was followed up by a 15 min explanation of why IE doesn’t do it, and how to fix it. I would’ve liked it if he went into more of the guts of HTML 5 though. And don’t even get me started on the XNA and Blackberry talks.
- By and for the development community, no fluff. Yeah right. You know how most open source products are free as in “free speech”? Well this event is free as in “free as long as you listen to our gold sponsors shill their products and services”. Don’t believe me? Have a look at their schedule
The day started with a keynote where a really annoying Seneca rep (platinum contributor) tried to convince us about the awesomeness of Seneca. The two web talks that we went to was done by a representative of Telerik, another platinum contributor (in his defense I’d like to say that he actually did an awesome job and he really knew his stuff). The Blackberry talk, Understanding the Blackberry Web Development Platform, was surprisingly useless. It was essentially a one hour product placement. No code, no frameworks, nothing. It was 60 minutes of drivel about BB Browser flavors and push content. In fact, if you look hard enough you’ll find that most of the speakers come from a platinum sponsor company. Now, I don’t mind the fact that they’re doing this because hell, this is a free conference and the TCC has to pay for all of this somehow. But lets see some more presentations like the Telerik ones and less Blackberry. Otherwise, don’t be so crass as to claim to be “by and for the development community”.
Are We Geniuses?
Let’s take a look at the schedule again, shall we? Take a good long look and see if any of the seminars catch your eye. These talks certainly caught mine:
- “Regular Expressions: The World’s Most Powerful Text Parsing Language” in S2168 at 9:30 (Really? ever heard of context-free grammars ?)
- “JQuery is your Friend” in S1206 at 9:30
- “The Basics of Unit Testing” in S2160 at 9:30
Now, I don’t want to sound like a total compsci snob; but are you kidding me? You’re telling me that out of all the possible topics that are relevant to Microsoft developers, regex, jquery and unit testing are on the top of the list? If you’re having trouble with these topics I think your Saturdays might be better spent on Wikipedia or Prog.Reddit.
I was also deeply disturbed by some some of the comments that I heard while at the TCC. It seems like a lot of the developers at the event were totally ignorant of technologies outside of the Microsoft universe. I think I counted 5 times where the speaker had to emphasize the fact that developers were going to have to learn Javascript and JQuery. I didn’t realize that would even be a problem if you were a web developer. Jesus, we even had people asking what Firebug was.
And I don’t think that this is a problem with the speakers themselves either. In fact, I had total respect for the speakers; they sound like they’re really smart people who’ve had some really strong hands-on experience with the technologies that they were talking about. It just felt like they were intentionally dumbing down their content for the audience; kinda like watching a physics major explain quantum physics to a 5th grader.
Don’t get me wrong, neither Derek nor myself believe that we’re God’s gift to software. We’ve seen enough code to know that we’re probably just a bit better than the average programmer. So why did we feel like nerdtastic badasses at this conference? I think that the problem comes from the fact that we come from an open background, while a lot of these Microsoft developers come from a closed background. Let me explain.
While at UofT, we learned about the theories of computer science through open technologies. In doing so, we also adopted the philosophies of behind those technologies for ourselves. For us, the idea of openess and sharing doesn’t stop at the software level; it extends into the areas of personal education and knowledge. If we find a really cool technology or trick that helps us make cool stuff, we’ll share it. Conversely, if someone else in the internet community finds cool things, we’ll learn about it through them. Its a give and take community where everyone wins.
But in a closed community with closed technologies, cash is king. There’s a lot of money to be made in training people how to use various technologies. These ideologies are vicious because it creates an environment where knowledge and information is hoarded like gold. You end up with people who don’t know what unit testing is because they weren’t “trained” to know it.
Anyways, those are my thoughts on the event. I’d be interested in hearing what you think, so leave a comment below if you want to weigh in.
Props to Chris Dufour, his team, and the volunteers of Toronto Code Camp 2010. Although I might have expressed some overly strong opinions on event, I think still think of it as a good learning experience and I wish you guys all the best.
5 Comments
Great recap!
But now you’ve got me curious. Not only as an interested developer but also because you triggered all my “XNA” google alarms.
What’s the deal with Blackberry and XNA?
I personally have nothing against XNA or Blackberry itself. I know a some friends who’ve used it for their video game design course at UofT, and they’ve had some amazing results. I personally use a blackberry as my phone, and I’m loving it.
My biggest gripe at the conference was with the Blackberry and XNA talks themselves.
The XNA talk consisted of an almost line-by-line walkthrough of the speaker’s code. It went something like: “here is an if statement to check for the number bullets, this is where we loop over polygons, this is where we load the texture file”. Given the audience and the limited amount of time, I was expecting a higher-level overview of how the framework itself.
The Blackberry talk was very business oriented. It felt more like a sales pitch more than anything. He talked very little about how to develop for the blackberry platform. The discussion was more focused on why you should be developing for the platform and why “its so awesome”. Its a real shame though because I had a sense that the speaker was actually very knowledgeable about developing for the BB
Ahhh I get you..that does sound disappointing. I’d be just as annoyed then.
It’s too bad the TCC organizers weren’t giving you some kind of clue beforehand as to the intended audience of each presenter. It sounds like some might’ve been too low-level / coder focused, while others weren’t low-level enough..
and that excel one just looks odd.
Hi James,
Thanks for your comments.
I was a volunteer and also helped out a bit on the organizational work of TCC2010. I don’t have much insider information, as I did not order the food, did not contact any sponsors/speakers, nor decide what to add into the welcome bags. (I did, however, worked with the York University Observatory for the after-event tour.)
A few things:
1) Seneca provided us free Wi-Fi, and thus the “Welcome” email that was sent the day before May 1 specifically asked people to bring their own laptops. It is greener to not print 600+ copies of maps and another 600+ copies of the agenda. There were maps in the hallway, and a copy of the agenda was posted right outside of each room.
(At the SharePoint Camp, hard copies of the agenda were given out to the attendees, but the venue did not have Wi-Fi.)
2) Over 1000 registrants != 1000 would show up. Actually, 600+ showed up on May 1, and in fact there were more than 400 lunches available (the extra ones were for the speakers, volunteers, etc — I *think* that’s why the main organizer said that only 400 lunches were there for the attendees). And don’t forget that some people go out for lunch at this sort of conferences (eg. Sharepoint camp, EnergizeIT).
York University’s food court is within walking distance, always open (I mean… till 11pm everyday), and you can get (IMO) better/tastier/healthier food from there. I think I did send some people to YorkU, and if Seneca is going to host the Code Camp again next year, then I will tell other volunteers to point people to the right direction (ie. YorkU food court) when the food runs out.
3) And related to “didn’t learn a goddamn thing” — I spent more time programming on Linux/Unix than on anything else, and thus I also agree that if you want to learn more about Linux/Unix/web, then may be you won’t learn much by going to this conference or most MS sponsored conferences.
On the other hand, 2 years ago I started going to MS sponsored user groups, events (EnergizeIT), conferences (Code Camp, SharePoint Camp), and I think at the very least I learned why the Windows programmers do things the “Windows way”.
4) And related to any un-interesting sessions — one could have always go to the 7 other sessions that were occuring in parallel… or even go sit in the coffee room and surf the web.
(I did not stay in any sessions long enough as I was too busy taking photos, so I won’t comment on the sessions.)
I graduated from UofT almost 9 years ago, and started working 10 years ago — again, mainly systems programming on Unix/Linux. If you google me you will find that I contribute code to more than 5 opensource projects (plus media contributions to Wikipedia), so I think I am qualified to call myself as an Open Source ™ contributor.
My take is that Windows is not going to go away anytime soon, and we have most developers developing on Windows. So if you believe in open source and open technologies, then may be you can think about giving a talk next year at the Code Camp??
Different people always have different opinions on what MS should do, or how “open and free” open and free software should be. But I think things now are going in the right direction — I talked to 2 MS employees at the Code Camp, and their job at MS is to work with Open Source developers on Windows.
I found this blog last night, which also looked at the whole openness issue at the Code Camp:
Raul Suarez’s blog on the Code Camp
And lastly, I know Karen Reid (and other people at the Computer Engineering Research Group). While she has never taught me before, I think Karen is a good lecturer and always open to suggestions. I discussed with her about the possibilities of assigning open source projects (as 4th year design projects) to students a while ago. I think that has not happened yet, as universities do not train people at the very practical level. On the other hand, 3 years ago I learned from a Seneca prof that Seneca has a number of Open Source Development courses, and they organize the FSOSS (Free Software and Open Source Symposium) every year. Their faculties and students contribute to Open Source projects — including Fedora, OpenOffice, Firefox (eg. Animated PNG).
So while Seneca might not be for you (or you don’t think that it is “awesome”), it does have its place in this Open Source Era.
Rayson
Hey Rayson, thanks for commenting, its nice to hear some other perspectives on the event.
1) I can see how we can save a lot of trees by not printing the agendas. Personally, I didn’t get the e-mail about laptops (only about the wifi), but those are little administrative stuff. I’m not going to lose sleep over it.
2) I understand that the TCC got a lot more registrants than expected, and I respect that. I also understand that registrants != attendees. I’m just saying more notice == win
3) I didn’t say I wanted to learn about only Linux/Unix/Web programming. This is a Microsoft event, and I’m not oblivious to the realities of the situation. In fact, we went to the Windows Phone 7 talks exactly so we could learn about technologies that we rarely get to hear about. We got so disappointed by the end of the second session that we jumped streams and went for the web one. We might not know the “Windows Way” right now, but hell, that’s why we went to this conference.
You make a good point though. If we’re really committed to learning the Microsoft technology stack, its not going to be handed to us on a silver platter. Exposure to more conferences and more events will definitely be a benefit.
4) Lol, maybe next year we’ll do more seminar-hopping. But surf the web we did, I think I got through the first 6 pages of Reddit before lunch that day
I have no doubt that Windows I here to stay; and I have no hatred towards Microsoft or its technologies. In fact, I’ve written software using C#; and its hella nice to write apps that can run and install without a lot of fuss.
Personally, I don’t necessarily believe that open source is the only way to go. Maybe one day we’ll be at that stage, but we’re nowhere near that kind of environment at the present time. What I do believe in, however, is open learning. And that means the free flow of information, knowledge and skills. I saw glimmers of that at the conference, but like you said, I might just be unaccustomed to the “Microsoft Way”.
After reading Raul Saurez’s post, he makes it sound like its already a big deal that you’re even talking about open source technologies all. If that’s the case, then congratulations to the TCC on making such great headway in introducing these technologies; but I’m sorry that’s just not good enough. Its not a question of open source-ness, its a question of relevance. If the “Microsoft way” was the best way, then I’d have no problems if we talked about it. But its not. HTML5, javascript, jQuery, and AJAX are pretty standard technologies. They work because they do the job, not because they’re open source or anti-Microsoft. And it scares me to think that many developers at that conference are literally scared of Javascript.
I don’t know if Greg Wilson was there while you were at UofT, but he made a lot of good changes to the upper year curriculum. We run 2 open source projects now: Basie and Markus. They are being actively used and developed by upper year students. We also have various capstone courses which work with various open source projects, and we do other stuff like help students with GSoC as well. I am well aware of the Seneca open source courses; in fact, I envy the students who get to participate in those classes. I have nothing against Seneca, and I dont know where you got any idea to the contrary. My gripe was with the Seneca rep and his silly jokes. He made a snide remark along the lines of: open source may hate Microsoft, but what they don’t tell you is that open source projects run on Windows first. That got a few chuckles, but it was a cheap shot and I really thought that a Seneca rep would be above that; especially knowing that they have their open source projects course
Some final thoughts. I’m not saying open source is the only way to go. I’m saying that our background in open source imbued us with the philosophies of open learning, to share information among peers and to grow as a community. There’s no reason why the .NET community can’t be the same