What I learned at CodeStock 2009

Adventure 20090626

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.

• A Developers Guide to SQL Server Integration Services by Robert C. Cain

• 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