Austin Code Camp 08 was a success, and I’m really glad I participated in it. About 150–200 eager developers came to learn and network with others from around the area.
I was able to attend 2 sessions, the first was “Agile in the Enterprise” by Joe Ocampo. His talk was full of a ton of powerpoint slides which really didn’t fit in with the size of the talk. Here are a few highlights:
- What makes success? -> People, Communication
- What makes failure? -> People, Communication
- People are often overlooked as critical factors of success of any project.
- “The worst thing you can do is isolate architects from developers.” — I couldn’t agree more.
- Siloed teams lead to lack of communication, trust. Change is very difficult.
- Composite teams are cross-functional – based on component, feature, subsystem, interface
- Agile projects will generally cost MORE — I can’t say I fully agree with this
- However, ROI can be realized much sooner, which can help overcome that cost
- In a waterfall project, technical debt is incurred and generally not paid back. Leads to lower pace and more costly maintencance.
- In an agile project, technical debt is minimized, keeping a sustainable pace and enabling change without high cost
- “Innovation Games” — to help you drive out features/priority with your customer
Some pics:
Next I went to a talk entitled “Designing for Stupid Users” which was a fantastic title. The talk was about User Experience Design and I found it to be informative but a bit dry. The speaker obviously knew the topic well and could speak to it, but the power point slides where just loaded with text.
There was a great picture on his deck though:
Basically (it’s hard to read) it says the left most “thing” that the users interact with is the screen. They then go through many different layers of “stuff” to get to their overall goal, which is a business action.
The rest of the day was me speaking, and I think they all went very well. I did notice, however, that the DDD with NHibernate is just too much material to fit into an hour. I should have submitted these as 2 sessions. I also ran out of time in the Advanced CSS & Javascript talk and didn’t get to demo much javascript.
All in all, it was a great event, I got to meet a lot of very cool people and I learned a bunch as well.
Thanks to all who organized, spoke, or attended the event! It was awesome.
To end the evening, we went to have beers at a nice place. Scott Bellware showed up and we had some really good conversations about community.
And then I made my journey back to Houston and slept for 10 hours. 
(oh, and you can download all of the material from the code camp at their google code repository)