Code Camp continues to grow by leaps and bounds each year. For those not familiar with Code Camp, it’s an all volunteer run conference at Foothill College each October and is on version 5.0. It lasts the whole weekend and this year over 3000 people registered and over 1900 ended up spending their weekend attending technical sessions ranging from How to Teach Programming to Kids to HTML5 Crash Course.
What I love about Code Camp is it represents the long tail of conferences and learning. Anyone can propose and lead a topic making it a great place for those that have an interest in speaking to technical audiences to cut their teeth. Even more important, you can find a talk on just about any subject. And with 3000 registrants, you are bound to find at least a dozen or more other people interested in the same. From a small sampling of my audience, this year’s hot topic was HTML5.
I spoke for the second time this year. My talk was on how to develop RESTful services and did some demos using RESTx, the new REST server project from MuleSoft. A first for me, almost no one in my audience had a Java background – there was a lot of JavaScript, Clojure, C#, and Ruby. It was probably one of the more enjoyable talks I’ve given and I got a lot of great questions from developers trying to understand REST and the transformation it is having on the idea of the Programmable Web.
If you missed my talk, you can find the slides online here and check out RESTx at http://www.restx.org. Finally, don’t forget to put Code Camp on your calendar for next year.
