I think this is my 6th year speaking and 7th year attending at SoCalCodeCamp (San Diego edition). For the past several years I have tried to give an advanced talk and an intro talk. For the advanced talk I decided to give OData again for several reasons.
- Nobody else was speaking on it
- I has already signed up to give a webinar on it
- I still think it is relevant
- It is so flipping cool
The slides and demos for that are in the previous blog post.
When it came time to pick an intro talk I combed the SoCal Code Camp web site looking for gaps. The gap I found was not what I am used to speaking about. I was going to have to give a talk about . . . the front end. (NOOOOO!!! Wait, I mean Sooooo what? What’s the big deal about the front-end?) Specifically, I wanted to give a talk about using an off-the-shelf CSS framework called Twitter Bootstrap. I had used it in my job, and in my side project, so I figured that should qualify me 
. I put in the abstract and then forgot about it.
Months go by, and here it is the week before the talk. I check back and realize a couple of things
- I had not used Twitter Bootstrap since I wrote the abstract
- There are over 80 people interested in the talk
- My daughter Julia has a soccer tournament on the same weekend
Long story short I wasn’t quite as prepared as I should have been.
The first day was pretty hectic. First I saw Robin Shahan give a talk on Windows Azure in Real Life. She good-naturedly accused me of heckling, but I think I was just encouraging audience participation . The second talk I saw was Search engine building with Lucene and Solr, but I left as the speaker transitioned into Solr. I ran home to help Julia get ready, and then back to Code camp to see Windows Azure Mobile Services by Bret Stateham. Great talk as always, but I had to leave early to see the soccer game, which they lost 2-3. I hustled back for NancyFX, which was probably my most influential talk of the weekend, then left again to see the final minutes of a 3-2 victory. Woohoo!!!
That night at the Geek dinner we found out that Woody was passing the baton after 8 years of running the SoCal code camps to Hattan. I also found out that night that my daughters team was playing the Surf at 10:00 (the same time as my OData talk) which sucked.
The second day I suffered through Data Flow Architectures, before giving my OData talk. While speaking I learned that my daughter’s team lost the 2-2 game in penalty kicks. The bright side to that was I didn’t need to worry about a conflict that afternoon. I then went on to see Timothy Strimple on Git and GitHub. I stayed in the room for Llewellyn and Chris Lucian talking about Agile Metrics, which helped me see some problems with the project that I was on.
The Twitter Bootstrap talk was the final talk of the day. It was in the TV building, and the room could probably only support 30-40 people, but it was packed. People were standing along the outside. Also mildly surprising there were children in the class! And they asked questions!?!? And the questions were good!!!
I had no idea how the timing of the talk was going to go, and in fact it ran over, but it was very well received. I was applauded (some even gave standing ovations – see previous paragraph) and several people stayed behind to congratulate me on a talk that I felt could have definitely gone smoother. I am glad everyone enjoyed it.
Thanks everyone for attending. Here are the demos and slides. Slides are also on slideshare.