One of my recent long term projects has been an attempt to upgrade my programming skills to "Developer" level, and during one of my research session for that goal I stumbled across a development conference being held here in Knoxville less than a half mile from where I work. I really enjoyed CodeStock and thought that I would share which of the sessions I attended and the links to the nifty tools everyone provided
Friday Sessions:
- Mindstorming 101 by Nathan Blevins. Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R2 is definitely under the "Cool Tools" category and is what I will be using during the design phase of creating my robotic minions.
- Open Spaces track facilitated by Alan Stevens and the Friday lunch discussion of "Job advancement that doesn't suck"
- 5 Classic Patterns in Everyday Code by Brian H. Prince
- Back to the Basics: A Programmer's Primer Programming in C# by Keith Elder
- The Basics of ASP.NET by Jeff Blankenburg
Saturday Sessions:
- Getting started with WPF by John Kellar
- Regular Expressions Revisited by Colin Neller. Regulazy by Roy Osherove is an excellent free mini-tool for working with and testing Regular Expressions. The Added Bytes Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet is very nicely formatted and is now hanging on my cubicle wall.
- Be a Better Developer by Michael Wood. Mike Wood was by far the best speaker of the convention, and during his session I ended up taking dozens of little TODOs for books I need to read or re-read, lectures I need to watch, and better habits I am going to try and develop going forward. Some of the highlights are re-reading Getting Things Done and making a habit of re-reading it again every year, reading How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci, reading Code Complete, watching the Last Lecture series by Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, making a habit of finding and using one new keyboard shortcut combo each week, and making a habit to do a "Better than" Google search review of all tools every half year or so.
- jQuery 101 by Rod Paddock
- How to make your application awesome with JSON, REST and WCF by James Bender
