Boise Code Camp Wrap-up

The first Boise Code Camp was this past weekend. It was very well received and turnout was higher than we were expecting. Congratulations go out to Jim and Cory who were the main local leads for the camp. And special thanks to Jason for presenting the idea to us and putting Microsoft's considerable weight behind the event.

I presented sessions about Ruby and Rails. The Rails session went very well, mostly because I stole half of the session from Jim Weirich’s A Quick Introduction to Rails talk. :)

The earlier Ruby session didn't go quite as smooth though. I've been struggling for the past two months on how to present about Ruby in 60 minutes. So much of what I love about Ruby are the subtle little things that Ruby does. I felt that you can't really show those subtle things until you explain where Ruby came from, the structure of the language, and how Ruby scripts are executed. Oh, and I was up almost the entire night before trying to solve a technical issue in my demo that I actually didn't ever get to. So I was very tired on top of a dry presentation. But the good news is that I learned from my mistake and the next time I present on Ruby I will be better prepared and more coherent. I promise.

I've taken the last couple days to recover and I'll post the slides and code samples later this week. Thanks to all that attended, it was a great time and I felt that the event was a tremendous success! We hope to make the camp a regular event in Boise. I hope that some who attended my sessions will consider joining the local Ruby user group as well.