Last weekend we organized the first Bulgarian code camp - CodeCamp.BG. We were not able to make a mass marketing campaign to popularize it and also setup the site at the last moment. This lead to total number of about 12-13 participants (lectors included) in the event. But exactly this was the key to the great experience we had. The atmosphere was extremely informal and everybody was sharing ideas and knowledge. We were having disputes on variety of different topics from Windows Home Server and virtualization technologies to customer support.
Presentations
We have not prepared a specific schedule for the presentations so we started with a lot. We used some old business cards to write down the names of all presenters and one of the two ladies in the huge audience picked them one by one. Ant the lot fell upon:
First was iCaci who introduce a general lecture about parallel computing. He showed different ways and algorithms to achieve parallelism if we are writing for multi-core platform. At the end of his lecture I was able to plug my notebook and show the new parallel extensions stuff in .NET framework - PLINQ, TPL, etc. as well as the asynchronous workflows in F#.
After iCaci it was Pepi's turn. He demonstrated the lightweight and fancy JavaScript library Mootools. As it turns out it has been used on many places on the web and along with jQuery is one of the fastest JavaScript libraries out there. What was nice was that Pepi have downloaded the whole Mootools site for offline browsing and was able to show all the effects in the library. Very smart.
[Update] Pepi did a new performance testing on the main JavaScript libraries and Dojo is now on top of the hill. Look at the full performance statistics here.
After mooing we jumped to another animal. This time it was a mono (monkey in Spanish). Vlado presented what is it to write applications with Mono project. A lot of great things there. The discussion ended with talk about how he has used Mono.Cecil library to get the job done.
After looking at the visual effects of the Ubunto that Vlado was using we jumped to totally different topic of continuous integration. Ivcho presented the CI Factory. Actually Ivo was the guy who setup it for Bookvar. CI Factory is great if you are starting a new project, but can be a little harmful if you want to migrate an existing one, is that right Ivo? ;)
Finally it was Emo's turn. Emo showed how easy it is to trackback (pingback) enable your site using Argotic Syndication Framework. Actually it was a way more easily that to drive your Hundai Coupe to and from the code camp place ;)
Pictures
Here are some pictures from the event:
When is the next edition?
We have plans to make the next CodeCamp.BG somewhere in May, before the start of summer holidays.
Can I participate?
Of course you can. CodeCamp.BG is a free event. You only have to pay for your stay at the place. You can participate as a lector as well. Just send us your presentation ideas.
Final words
Finally I want to give a big thank you to all the guys who were there. I think we had a great time except for the chilly place :)
P.S.: Here are some links of the codecamp's blog coverage: Pepi, Marto, Dido.
