CodeMash wrapped up last Friday with a prize giveaway consisting of literally hundreds of computer books, an Xbox 360, a Nintendo Wii, and various other items slipping my mind at this early hour. All of these prizes were courtesy of our wonderful sponsors. Before departing, fellow organizers Josh Holmes and Brian Prince made good on their promise to shave their heads in return for 500 attendee blog posts made over the course of the event (technically we fell just a bit short of 500 but they didn’t want to let the chanting crowd down). You can see the resulting hairdos (or is it hairdon’ts) on Flickr.
All said the conference seems to have been a success. Attendee buzz and feedback is still going on at our Google Newsgroup. In fact, so much post-conference interest was generated that “CodeMash” was the #1 most searched term on Technorati over the weekend, and even today it’s still #7.
Keynote speaker Bruce Eckel offered a great event summary, as did attendee Cal Evans (Zend’s Devzone Editor-in-Chief).
Fellow organizer Darrell Hawley offered a detailed breakdown of involved parties, therefore if you’re interested in learning more about who was responsible for this mess, I’ll point you to his blog. Darrell does however leave one particularly important person from the list: himself. Darrell was the primary interface between the conference team and the Kalahari venue, and dealt with a neverending list of tasks.
We’re already talking about CodeMash v.2.0. Stay tuned!!!
Check out the Flickr Photostream
Jan 26, 06:17 pm
Thanks for the love, though it should be noted that Jason is actually one of the principals of CodeMash. That’s right. Jason was one of the very foolish people – along with Brian Prince and Jim Holmes – to put their financial neck on the chopping block for this. If you attended the event, you know that it was all worth it. CodeMash was a very special event. If you missed it, make sure you come to the next one. Any attendee or speaker will tell you that events like these are all too rare. To quote the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group, this event was by developers for developers. Make sure you’re there next time. The venue – Kalahari in Sandusky, Ohio – was enough to keep anyone occupied when you needed a break from the “Geek Speak”. Though, as an organizer and a new convert to the open space concept – I think I will be attempting a series of Open Space meetings in the water park right after lunch. After all, that is about the time of day that I have lost my ability to be “talked at”. Could it be that the length of an Open Space session is directly correlated to the number of laps around the lazy river? It remains to be seen. Sorry to make this so similar to one of my rambling blog entries.