Not enough time at Code Camp

Other obligations (my wife's college reunion) prevented me from attending the first day of Code Camp. Although I was happy to accompany my wife on her stroll down memory lane, I missed a ton of good content (the SOA through WS-Policy talk by Derek Harmon, for example, and I would love to have seen Richard Crandall's talk on Apple's ACG).

I flew in Sunday morning, expecting to see some of the sessions before mine (Jason Mauer's talk on rendering and Tim Shakarian's talk on Linq were promising, in addition to a lot of other great content).

Unfortunately, I was beset with technical problems when I arrived. My machine had trouble with the proxy server and their network, and it took a bunch of help from help from Robert to help me through it. We both have Skype, which was really useful for technical support.

As a result, I missed the sessions before mine. Although I thought my session went great, I was really disappointed not to be able to see other folks' talks. That's the point of Code Camp, right? I already knew the stuff that I was going to say; I wanted to hear what other people had to say!

I really hope that the Bay Area gets something like this going. We've got plenty of IT related user groups (E-Big, Bay.NET User Group, to name a couple, plus a ton of Linux groups). I think the overwhelming feeling from Code Camp Seattle is that it really benefits the developer community as a whole to have these "non-denominational" community meetings.

[Update 11:18]I just realized that Brad Abrams was there, too. Bummed that I missed his talk on reusable class libraries..