Happy 2024! And welcome to what I hope will be the first of many conference recap posts for this year. We will start with one of my favorite conferences: Codemash. This event takes place at the Kalahari Resorts and Convention center in Sandusky, OH in January. This year’s event was from January 9th to January 12th.
A family friendly conference.
As you can tell by the location, this is a conference where attendees usually bring their families along, not just because it’s at a waterpark (who doesn’t love that?) but also because of the kid-friendly sessions that happen during the conference.
You heard that right! The “kidzmash” sessions this year had everything from 3D printing, to beginner magic and a session on how to become a radio operator there was something for kids of every ages to learn and have fun with.
Precompiler sessions.
The first 2 days of the conference are for “Precompiler” sessions (workshops), these are half day or full day sessions that offer deep dives into different topics. For me, this year I started on Tuesday morning being Matt Eland‘s sidekick for a session where attendees had the chance to build their own AI sidekick with Azure AI, semantic kernel and .NET 8. While I thoroughly enjoyed being Matt’s sidekick that also meant missing other half-day precompilers that happened that morning: Building Trust and Breaking Barriers (with LEGO!) by Thomas Haver or Build a Modern Single Page Application with Vue by Matt Burke.
Since I had my own full day precompiler on Wednesday I used the afternoon to relax with the kids at the waterpark and get everything ready for the next day, and that meant missing the second part of Todd Libby’s session: Accessibility Auditing: Getting Started with Accessibility and Building a Web Component Library with Burton Smith.
On Wednesday it was my turn to present (together with Brian Gorman) our session on “Deploying infrastructure with Bicep and Terraform”, where we walked attendees through the basics of Bicep and Terraform with the ultimate goal of being to deploy a .NET application to Azure. We received great feedback during the day and are looking forward to present that session at other events. Other workshops that stood out to me on Wednesday are: Mad Scientist Lab With Raspberry Pi Pico Microcontrollers with Barry Tarlton and Brendan Barth, Event Storming Unleashed: Building Bridges for Effective Communication with Sara Dutkiewicz and Off The Shelf AI with Jordan Thayer and Robert Herbig.
Regular sessions.
Thursday and Friday is the time for regular 1 hour sessions. Personally, one of the criteria I use to rate a conference is the number of conflicts in my schedule and Codemash was off the charts as usual. Thursday started with Burton Smith’s session: Using Web Components to Scale Your UX, it was a great introduction to web components that included a lot of information that attendees could explore afterwards. This is definitely something that I want to explore on the side in case I come across a project where I need to use this tool.
The next session I attended was Dev Agrawal’s Meet Your New BFF: Backend to Frontend without the Duct Tape where he showed the audience how to use Remult to build an application, this is another tool that I haven’t worked with yet but seemed really interesting to learn.
Next was Steve Odell’s session: Isn’t it time to ditch code coverage? Focus on high value tests instead, where he offered a very interesting take on how (and most importantly, why) to switch the criteria we use to measure how much testing to add to our application. It definitely made sense to me and it is something that I hope I can convince clients to switch to.
One of the conference’s highlights for me was Barry Stahl’s presentation: GPT Embeddings – Not Magic, Just Math. This was a super informative and engaging session on how embeddings work, how you can use them in your applications as well as some of the risks and bias that you need to be aware of when using them.
After a quick break to play with the kiddos I went back to the conference to attend Ilyana’s Smith session: Aerospace Engineering for Computer Scientists because, who doesn’t love space? This was a really cool presentation on the parallels between aerospace engineering. My day finished with What Does Security Look Like When Building AI? by Robert Herbig where he showed the audience some of the AI specific security risks that need to be considered while working on a project.
Friday started with The Vue.js Power Hour: Building a Dynamic Frontend in < 60 Minutes by Tori Brenneison, this was a full blown live coding demo (which I love) on how to create a Vue application from scratch. Next was a session that I had missed a couple other events and that I finally had a chance to attend: How to answer “When will it be done?” using probabilistic forecasting. by Chris Shinkle where he shared a few different methods to estimate when a particular task will be done, I am really looking forward to explore the resources he provided and use the information to improve the way I provide estimates.
After a quick break to take my oldest son to a session on HAM radios I attended Brad Knowles presentation .NET on AWS: Wait, you can do that?. Even though I work mostly in Azure I like to stay up to date on other cloud providers’ capabilities just in case it is ever needed in a client project. Brad did a great job presenting the different options available to run .NET in AWS and provided a list of resources that attendees could explore on their own.
Since I was working on a micro-frontend project the week before Codemash I decided to check out Marko Skugor’s presentation titled The Micro-Frontend Playbook. This was a session that provided a very detailed walkthrough of what micro front ends are, when to use them and some strategies to avoid implementing them in the wrong way.
The last slot was split (did I mention I had a lot of conflicts in my agenda?) between Agile Pitfalls and How to Parry Them: A Practical Guide by Arin Hanselman and Visual Storytelling: How to be a Superhuman Communicator by David Neal which was an absolutely amazing presentation, I am really looking forward to attend another one of David’s sessions.
Unfortunately, there are only so many hours in the day which means I missed out on sessions from Cory House, David Giard, Steve “Ardalis” Smith, Arthur Doler and many more. If you are interested, you can check out the slides for some of those presentations here.
What else is there to do?
Hopefully, that’s enough to convince you that this is an event that you can’t miss, but if you are still on the fence there are a few more things that I would like to mention:
- Board games: Attendees can swing by throughout the day to the designated room to play, this is a great opportunity to have fun but also do some effortless networking.
- Attendee reception: Since the bulk of the attendees arrive on Wednesday there is a reception which gives you another great chance to meet other attendees.
- Artemis and Laser tag: Available throughout the day is a dedicated room for playing laser tag as well as the artemis simulator. Who doesn’t love laser tag?!
- Thursday night party: This has everything, casino night, accoustic jam, a rave and the biggest dessert table you’ve ever seen.
- Makerspaces: You will find rooms with 3D printers, electronics and soldering equipment where you can build something like this:
Sounds awesome! When is the next edition?
Codemash 2025 will take place from January 14th to the 17th, if you want to stay up to date you can join their Discord server here. Hope to see you there next year!