CodeMash 2009 - Day 2

Today was a bit rough after drinking with the geeks and then fighting my bout with insomnia last. I woke up at 7:30 and headed down for breakfast. Eric Meyer gave the keynote this morning about how "Javascript Will Save Us All". It was pretty interesting and he provided a lot of useful information on how people are able to get around various problems faced on the web today with a little bit of Javascript. I had a hard time keeping my eyes open and caught myself dozing off here and there.

I decided to head back to my room for a "quick nap".

About 4 hours later I woke up. I ran down to the lunch hall to see if I could catch a bite to eat real quick, and I did. My lunch consisted of watermelon and cookies. :) After lunch, I went to see "A Programmers Guide to User Experience" by Josh Walsh. It was very informative and it gave me some ideas on how to approach some of the problems I'm currently facing with a project I'm working on. Josh clearly knew what he was talking about.

From there, I attended James session on "Practical Data Visualization", which looked very familiar to say the least. :) James did a great job and I think the others in the room did learn a thing or two on good charts vs. bad charts. Well done sir. :)

After James' session, I v-lined it for Dustin Cambell's session on "Multi-threading Mojo with F#". I've seen Dustin talk about F# in the past and he is a very good speaker. He get's everybody in the crowd involved and has a great sense of humor about what he's teaching. He showed off some pretty amazing stuff with the various asynchronous features that F# has to offer. The amazing thing to see was how much code it took to do the same thing in C#. Crazy difference.

The giveaway session was pretty funny and Joe Wirtly didn't win anything this year! :) He's won the main prize the last two years (of all the people here, he won). Ironically enough, this year the main winner was sitting at his table. I plan to sit next to Joe next year... Save me a seat please Joe. :)

Anyway, after the giveaway, James, Raji, Mike, and I all ate down at the restaurant before they had to all go their separate ways. I came up to my room, researched some stuff, chatted with Jennifer for a while, then did my 4 miler on the dreadmill, and then chilled. That's where I'm at now... TNT has some pretty good movies on and I have all my stuff packed waiting for the morning. CodeMash 2009 is in the books. Great event!!