Unofficial CodeMash 2014 Activities
With December rapidly coming to an end I thought I would take the opportunity to bring up that beloved Winter event, CodeMash. Yes, CodeMash is just around the corner and in addition to all of the great sessions that will be there, the open spaces, the attendee waterpark party, the after hours sessions, the game room, the jam session and a bunch of other stuff I’ve missed in this list there are an additional two *unofficial* activities that I would like to mention, mostly because I am the coordinator for them.
The first one is the door decorating competition. For all the years I have attended CodeMash I have been jealous of the cheerleader conference that comes in to the Kalahari the weekend after CodeMash. I’ve walked the hallways of the hotel and seen door after door decorated with ribbons, glitter, boy band pictures and other sparkly stuff. Last year I decided enough was enough and figured that the technical community can do as good or better than these kids. So I started the first unofficial CodeMash door decorating competition, in which I encouraged the attendees at all the conference hotels to decorate their hotel room doors. To my great joy a number of people stepped up and really put some serious effort into decorating their doors. I am amazed at the creativity and quality of the entries last year, and with the help of a few gracious members of the technical community I was even able to award small prizes to the winners.
This year I am asking for more. I want more people to decorate their hotel room doors. Just like last year I will be prowling the hallways of all the conference hotels, with my camera at the ready, to document your creativity. Just for reference, I am considering any hotel at which the CodeMash shuttle stops as a conference hotel so even if you are not at the Kalahari I expect you to participate. In fact, just like last year, I am going to open the competition up to non-CodeMash attendees. If you are not able to make it to CodeMash but still want to participate you can decorate your office door, cubicle wall or the front door of your house, send me a picture of it and I will enter you in the competition.
I am hard at work on an improved voting application that should be ready in time for CodeMash. Watch this blog, the CodeMash Google Group and the #CodeMash Twitter stream for the details when I launch it.
In addition, just like last year, there are a lot of overlapping sessions that I want to see and I know that I won’t be able to make it to. I am once again going to be doing my best to collect all of the presentation materials (slide decks, code samples, speaker blog entries, etc.) in one place so that everyone has a way to find these resources after the conference ends. To accomplish this I am maintaining a GitHub repository where I will do my best to accumulate all of the CodeMash session materials. If you are a speaker, attendee at a session or just a generally nice person I would really appreciate your help. The repository is public and I would love it if you could send me a pull request with the details of the session materials. I am planning on structuring it like the repository from last year so please feel free to contribute.
As I noted before neither of these are official CodeMash events, I am not affiliated with the conference, any sponsors or anything else. I just think that these are cool ideas.
Thanks to everyone, and I look forward to seeing you at CodeMash, I will once again be the guy in the kilt. Well, if Gary Short shows up then I will be one of the guys in a kilt.
Finally, I will also be at the CodepaLOUsa conference in February (which is yet another awesome conference, you really should go) and I will also be running another door decorating competition there as well as gathering up all of the presentation materials that I can find into another GitHub repository. If you are going to be there then please do plan on decorating your hotel room door and if you’re not yet signed up for the conference I am happy to get you a discount on registration.
I hope to see you around!