I was really excited to attend the Philly.Net code camp 2014 event as this is my first developer community event after I reached America that too with the reimbursement from my company. My expectations were huge as there are many MVPs taking sessions and can mingle with more intelligent and smart programmers. As of my analysis, ideally if somebody is smart, they eventually end up in United States provided they don't have his old parents who don't want to go US. Another interesting factor is the organizers will distribute more goodies / gifts to the attendees as they are taking registration fees :-)
The biggest difference from the events I had attended India and this code camp is the number of sessions and its schedule. In India the events I had attended conduct only one session at a time because audience and speakers are comparatively low in number. Regardless of the interest in the session, we had to sit until the next session starts. But here in Philly.net code camp there are around 72 sessions to be conducted in 2 days and there are 8 stages which means 8 sessions will go in parallel. In one way its good that we don't need to sit in a session which is boring. But in the other hand, if there are 2 or more sessions we want to attend, we can't.
Anyway just noting down my experience in the format of 'what I expected' and 'what I really got'. Selection of session was really tough as there are at least 2 sessions interesting at any time slot.
JavaScript for Devices by Andrew Duthie
What I expected
It will be purely hardware related where he will explain about boards such as Raspberry Pi / Arduino and show demo using the board. The javascript execution environment needs to be installed into the board where we can execute our javascript code. The javascript to hardware binding would be done using Assembly or C language and those details may also in discussion.
What I got
As per the short description in the schedule, he started with a presentation which tells what is micro controller and what is Espruino board and compared it with other board Tessel. These are the boards which are supporting the javascript out of the box. After 4-5 slides he started demo. Normally I have seen people showing demo about hardware in simulator as it is difficult to show the device to the entire audience. But for the demo he just used a camera which is on the table where he is playing with the device. As its connected to USB port, he was able to project it. Simple solution. Everyone can understand what the board is and how it work.
The board is connected to his laptop via COM3 and he used a program called Web IDE to communicate to the device. The Web IDE supports interactive mode as well as program mode. In program mode we write the program in the Web IDE and just push to the board and it start execution.
The board contains many LEDs, I/O pins which can be programmed using javascript. He also demonstrated how to read temperature using sensor connected to the board, started fan, LED matrix board controlling etc...
It was really nice, I got more than I expected. But only thing worrying me is the price $99 of the Espruino board.
Refactoring to a S.O.L.I.D foundation by Stephen Bohlen
What I expected?
Ideally I planned to attend another session named "Using Azure to analyze Yammer data". But unfortunately that session got cancelled. So thought of attending this all time favorite SOLID session. I had attended couple of SOLID sessions earlier and myself took SOLID sessions to the developers. Whenever I took sessions the audience had complained about one thing. SOLID is good in theory and easy to talk but difficult to follow especially when we are working in delivery oriented service companies. So thought of getting some practical tips from this session which I can pass to my fellow developers
What I got
The session went well. He started with the 'swiss army knife' image to describe Single responsibility principle and reached to Dependency inversion very quickly. He started with an console app which is printing report and modified the same example to show all the principles throughout the session. I thought 'oh this is yet another session about SOLID". Then he started giving some practical tips. Peter Parker principle, Boys scott principle etc...Finally an advice of "If you have a huge legacy code base, refactor only the areas which are changing / going to change frequently". Why to spend time and money by refactoring the areas which are not going to change at all?
Another interesting information I got is about the .net exception class NotImplementedException. As per him this exception is added into framework to make sure all the auto generated code segments are getting compiled. For example we can use the IDE to implement the interface methods, if this exception is not there, the generated code will not compile. But as per the design of automatic code generation, the auto generated code should not create compilation errors hence they created this exception in framework. But in production code this NotImplementedException should not be present.
Practical machine learning - Recommender engine & anomaly detection by Seth Juarez
What I expected
To be frank I have not paid much attention towards Mathematics in college as I was thinking, that is not required for a computer science student. I concentrated in improving my logical skills and problem solving skills and up to an extent I succeeded in it. There was nobody to show me the practical uses of Maths in programming. If there was one, I should have given more attention towards it.
I realized the problem when I was asked to draw a spiral 3D image in WPF as part of project requirement. From that time, I started paying attention towards maths. The same problem hit me when I started studying data analysis. It requires a huge amount of statistical knowledge along with other areas of Mathematics. So I was expecting a session where I can learn data analysis techniques very quickly.Kind of hacks. Also he might explain how the analysis can be applied in real life applications.
What I got
He started explaining what is the difference between science and engineering and why data analysis is called data science. As we all know in science, we cannot guarantee the success. We may get a solution or we may not. Its all research. I was happy as it enforced my view about data science.
Then he explained about different types of machine learning algorithms such as supervised and unsupervised . Then K-Means algorithm. I was trying hard to learn that for some long time. But after he demonstrated that algorithm using his own sample application, I was able to catch it up very quickly. He nicely explained how the distance calculation is used in these algorithms. Then session moved to recommender engine and finally to anomaly detection.
Debugging production web applications on IIS by Ed Ferron
What I expected
I have taken 'Debugging production apps' session in my company. So I was eager to get more practical oriented tips and tricks instead of how to create memory dump using DebugDiag and analyzing it using WinDbg or Visual Studio itself. I was also interested in tools which can make the debugger's life easier.
What I got
He explained pretty much same things like how to get memory dump and analyze it using WinDbg. I don't think he touched even the PerfView or how to debug the app using ETW logs. The interesting information I got is about intelliTrace and its collector which is the 'rich developer's tool'. When I was working in India VS Ultimate was our ultimate dream, which company never provided. But here in same company's US office, same project everybody has VS Ultimate. So now I can start thinking about intelliTrace.
Create an RDBMS-free app by David Hoerster
What I expected
I was expecting a guy who believes only in open source and he will explain details about how an application can be built without SQL Server or Oracle RDBMS. Also I can learn how transactions can be managed using NoSQL databases such as MongoDB.
What I got
I got an idea how we can introduce non RDBMS into applications which is running RDBMS. It will end up as a system where there will be RDBMS as well as non relational databases. His suggestions was to use non RDBMS for searching and storing logs. Interesting thing was he never mentioned the word NoSQL in any of his slides or sentences even though he talk about NoSQL systems. According to him the logging and search index updation doesn't need any transaction so its good place for non relational databases.
This was the one only session I have seen one person falling with his chair. I think he was sleeping.
Improving your application architecture by Ravi Okade
What I expected
So much expectations such as how to architect systems, how to select programming languages, how to scale etc...
What I got
He started with very basics such as what is data structure and what is algorithms. Explained about the sorting techniques. With each and every sorting technique, he was telling that its already taken care by .Net framework functions. Then he told about how to select serialization method for our applications. Interesting thing I got from this session is, the names of serialization protocols such as Apache Thrift, Microsoft Avro etc...He showed some comparison screens for different serialization techniques.
The time was already running late and didn't find it much interesting. It sometime felt like he is reading the slides. There was no code too. So thought of searching for his slide sometime later.
Day 1 Overall
- 8 sessions are running in parallel so difficult to attend all the session which are interesting to me
- The stages don't have good separation. So most of the time we can hear 2 speakers. Else the seat should be just opposite to the speaker in the front row.
- Most of the sessions used less slides and more code. Really oriented towards programmer community.
- No video recording was happening. If they record the videos, it would be really helpful to view the missed sessions.
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