11 November, 2010

Iowa Code Camp Notes

I attended the Iowa Code Camp at the West Campus of DMACC last Saturday (Nov. 6) . Many thanks to the sponsors of the event, especially GoDaddy.com, QCI, Robert Half Technology, and DMACC. Their support provided lunch, refreshments, prizes, and the venue for the event.

It's always good to find out more about software technologies and that other groups are using, that you yourself may not be using, but which could be of benefit. Myself, I'm not much of a web developer, so some of these talks certainly are in order so that I find out what the real virtual world is doing.

Silverlight looks kind of interesting to me, at least the concept is appealing. It looks like it has the ability to do some pretty nice things, but I suspect its applicability is limited to those in some type of windows (Microsoft) environment. (I may be wrong here.)

The most entertaining session I attended was called the Programming Language Royal Rumble. The same application (a simple twitter-like web app) was developed using different languages, Java, Python & Django, and (C# with Linq???). People at the session who weren't familiar with Python seemed fairly impressed by it, in spite of the fact that the developer purposely chose not to use some of Django's features in order to demonstrate Python's abilities.

The event is a good networking opportunity as well.