Silicon Valley Code Camp: Wrap up

Well, I had a lot of fun on Sunday with both of my presentations; both were well attended, and in both I had some really good questions and contributions from the attendees. One of the things that I was very surprised to see was the number of women at the event. I’ve been in this industry since 1987 and I had grown accustomed to being very outnumbered by the men. Many times, I was the only woman. Not on Sunday. It’s nice to see the industry changing. And perhaps this change will mean that being successful in this industry as a woman, doesn’t require that a woman be 4x better than all the men.

For all of you who have submitted session reviews: Thank you. Detailed reviews are valuable tools to help improve a presentation. However, some of the reviews pointed out a problem that I also see reflected in the world of blogging. People don’t read. Or maybe I made too many assumptions about their comprehension of what I wrote. In the future I’ll try to provide a clearer title. The reviews for my debugging session went from really liked the session to the session was useless. What’s interesting to me is that the people who didn’t like the session didn’t seem to understand what I was planning to talk about. I specifically stated in the session description that we would be looking at the disassembly, register, and memory windows. Those windows have little value if we don’t talk about Assembly. A lot of debugging is learning to creatively use the tools that you have available to you. If you don’t understand the information the tools expose then you won’t be able to do that.

I think that both debugging and performance are two huge subjects that we could do more to talk about and, as I suggested in the debugging session, I think we would all benefit from targeted performance and debugging conversations.

I also realized that I really don’t know what the definition for Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced are. Especially in technology. While I think it is easier to assess a person’s level as an athletic coach, determining the level for a technology presentation is harder. Another factor that a lot of people don’t realize is that in any presentation each attendee brings unique skills and experiences to the session. This makes it hard for a presenter to put together a generic presentation that will benefit everyone. Next code camp, I’ll ask the organizers if they can post some standard level definitions so that we will all have a better idea what to expect.

For those of you who wanted more in the area of grid computing, in particular Digipede...Well, out of respect for the code camp I tried to stay away from a sales type of presentation. I encourage you to go to this webpage and request a free copy of the Digipede Network Developer Edition. Yes, you do have to fill out some contact information, but really it’s not that big a deal. The Digipede Network Developer Edition is a fully featured version of the Digipede Network Team Edition. The only limitation is that your grid can only install two Agents. But you get everything. The Digipede Server, Digipede Agent, Digipede Control (administration tool), Digipede Workbench (GUI app that creates and runs Jobs via a wizard), Digipede Framework SDK (this is the cool stuff), and complete documentation with code samples. And if you were looking for more information you can also cruise around the main site. We’ve put up a bunch of videos and some whitepapers to try and make it easier for people to understand the technology.

Many thanks to the code camp organizers and to all the volunteers and donors who made the event such a success.