Utcodecamp, the community attended, lightly sponsored coding convention in SLC consisted of user-driven presentations on topics from XBox programming and XCode to IronRuby and C# 3.0. It felt like a good mix of topics and definitely not a waste of a code monkey's time.
I got out of it what I put into it (which is a little info here and there on various emerging code trends). Coming out of it, I was able to make up my mind on a few things:
- Apple's Interface Builder seems slick while it's IDE for code seems lacking
- Rails, and the new baby in the family, IronRuby are appealing and offer hopes of web programming Zen without the bitter aftertaste of the Microsoft Cool-Aid-induced euphoria of "new and better things" in (fill in the blank) technology
- Silverlight must be avoided at all costs
You're gonna have to write a lot of converters
The Silverlight demo was good just to see what it took to get something working. The presentation jumped the shark when the presenter started editing raw XML just to move widgets around on the demo control. This drew WTF looks from me and Ceaser. The killer line for me was when the presenter had to write a number converter for the demo and said: "Yeah, you're gonna have to write a lot of converters like this". From then on, any further access into my head resulted in "Object not set to an instance of your brain". I switched off.
The Shark Pit
If you've ever walked into a Men's Wearhouse or an electronics store on a slow day, you've seen the hungry, soulless eyes of a group of salesmen, standing together sizing up any lone, straggling customer who wandered into those waters mistakenly. The same look was reflected in the eyes of the tech recruiters at code camp. Their table was strategically positioned by the food, forcing unwitting code monkeys to file past. I ended up talking with them for a minute and confirmed my assumptions about the state of recruiting techies in Utah. The market seems to be tight right now, not like the code party of 1999, but it'd be tough to gather a dev team of 20 or more in this area.
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