Richmond Code Camp Recap

Ok, so this can’t be a full blown recap of the Code Camp.  I wasn’t able to stick around the whole day.  My wife and I celebrated our 6th anniversary this weekend.  So there was no way I could get by with spending the whole Saturday at a technical conference.  However, I really enjoyed the time I spent there.  It was a great environment, and I thought the organizers did a great job.

I presented a talk titled “Continuous Integration or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Build”.  I felt like it was fairly well attended and well received by those that were there.  I’m pretty new to presenting, so I think it went about as well as I could have expected.  The main glitch was the resolution of my screen vs. the resolution of the projector.  I didn’t realize the projector was cutting off my slides until about halfway in.  Instead of fixing it, I tried to keep driving forward.  I think it would have gone better if I had taken the minute or two to fix the discrepancy.

Anyway, I felt like I had a great audience and really enjoyed their participation.  Also, I felt like I did get the point across that Hudson rocks.  Hudson is a great tool to present Continuous Integration as an accessible practice.  I mean, I can spin it up from scratch and have new projects running in a matter of a few minutes.  I wouldn’t even dream of doing that with other CI tools in a live demo in front of a crowd.

So, with the success of this weekend, I’m going to take this talk to some other venues.  Next up, I’m penciled in to present this at May’s Richmond Java User’s Group.  I’ll have to rework some of the demo to translate the .NET project and tools to the Java platform.  I love the fact that I’m able to use the same talk for audiences from different platforms and languages.

This is really exciting for me.  For the last year and a half, I have had two major career goals.  First, to be equally proficient between the .NET and Java platforms.  Second, start presenting at user groups and conferences.  This is great because I am knocking both out at the same time.