Code Camp Oz - Summary and Dumb Thoughts
Well, Code Camp Oz 2, unofficially subtitled 'Return of the I Know What You Did Last Revenge Strikes Back Harder' happened over the weekend.
Just like last year, it was a fantastic time. It well put together, a heap of great content, a whole lot of cool people to meet up with and chat with - it was just geeky goodness from start to finish.
It all started on Saturday night, the night before it was due to properly kick off. About 50 geeks stampeded on the local Montezuma's restaurant to chat, start geeking out early, drink a bit, make out (well, maybe not) and relax before the learnin' started.
Amazingly, we even managed to find what appears to be my long lost brother. See Grant's blog for more info on that one :) I choose to name this piece of artwork 'El Gringo and El Geoffo'.
It was great to catch up with everyone, old friends and new, as well as adding a few more faces to names that I've known for a long time on places like the aus-dotnet mailing list. I'm not going to name them all, it'd take too long.
One thing I did notice during the course of the weekend was some people's tendency to sometimes invent words. After hearing one or two, I tried to keep track of interesting word and phrase usage. I'm not going to name names (mostly), but here's the most interesting or amusing ones that I found:
-
Caringness. Eg, here's a list of why you should care about WinFS, in order of caringness.
-
Impactful. Eg, For developers, dealing with layout changes in WPF will be the most impactful.
-
Kinda Ubiquitous. Now, ubiquitous means something along the lines of being everywhere all at once' So if you're kinda ubiquitous, does this mean that you're 'being somewhere all at once'?
-
This is biggest release of Vista ever. Obviously, he meant to say Windows, not Vista. Being the first release of Vista, it must logically be the biggest without even trying :)
-
Descriptive description. Eg, With this new control in Vista, you'll be able to provide a more descriptive description.
-
It's either doing stuff or it's not. There was a longer than usual delay when waiting for something to happen in a demo, and so this gem was said. I can confirm that what was expected did not involve nullable types, and so we weren't dealing with a ternary state - so thanks for stating the obvious :)
-
Hackage. Eg, This was one method of hackage that could be used.
Rocky was helping keep track of this list, so when it was his turn on stage, he deliberately threw one in for me. Thanks dude :)
-
Collapsing Up and Down. Eg, see, when I click it a few times, it collapses up and down. This one just tickles me, since all I can imagine is someone falling down some stairs, and them immediately falling up them again.
It just goes to show that while us developers might work with languages (of the programming kind), that doesn't make us linguists :) If you're one of the people who dropped these lines, I intend you no offence - I find humour in different places, that's all, and I'm certainly not attacking your presentation skills. Although, 3 of these come from the same guy - well done! :)
Oh, and for just plain funniest quote (intentional this time) over the weekend, I have to declare it a tie. In no particular order, we have this gem from Mitch Denny while giving and introduction to LINQ:
Oh, you use codegen for your database code? So you spend your life debugging then?
And from Darren Neimke, in his intro to Vista talk:
Question given to him from someone in the audience: I work with a lot of people who are blind or mostly blind, is there anything new in Vista that improves their experience?
Answer: Well, I guess they won't really appreciate the new aero glass stuff...
So besides all the bits that strike my funny bone, it really was a great weekend. Well done to all involved who made it happen, most especially Mitch and Greg Low - you guys rock!