Codemania: 30 March 2012
You may have seen the name flow past on your twitter stream or on your facebook wall - but what is it? It's a software developer conference coming to Auckland on Friday March 30th, brought to you by Ben Gracewood and Ian Randall. It's a world-class, cross-platform, multi-language event boasting an internationally recognised speaker line-up presenting topics that focus on the art of creating great solutions, putting aside religious debate about curly-braces over whitespace.
As members of the Microsoft developer community, we can see that attitudes are changing toward things like learning new languages and embracing new philosophies, such as open-source. So when we decided to host a developer conference, we knew that we had to involve as much of the developer community as they could, and that includes the large number of Microsoft devs in and around New Zealand today.
This brings us to two of the many compelling reasons why you should come along to Codemania: Microsoft content, and broadening your horizons:
Microsoft Content
We have some of the best speakers on the Microsoft dev platform that you will see in New Zealand this year. Starting with local talent, we have Ivan Towlson, who you'll know if you've been to Tech.Ed for the last couple of years: Ivan is the one in the overflowing room, blowing peoples' minds with deep technical information on F#, the CLR, the DLR and advanced coding techniques.
We've also got Phil Haack and Damian Edwards coming all the way from Seattle. Phil is formerly Program Manager in the ASP.NET MVC team, and now works at GitHub. He'll be speaking about community development and also covering NuGet. Damian is a Program Manager on the ASP.NET team, and will be showing off some of his latest work around persistent connections using things like long-polling and WebSockets.
Slightly further afield, we have Sam Saffron from Stack Exchange. You might know that StackOverflow is built on the Microsoft platform, and performs incredibly well despite a constant, heavy load. Sam's going to share some performance tips and insights from his time at StackOverflow.
Broaden Your Horizons
When we created Codemania, one of our main goals was to bring developers from multiple backgrounds to the same event. Why? Because it helps all of us to become better developers. Learning more than one programming language is a proven way to improve your skills in your main language. Seeing how other platforms solve similar problems can give you new ideas to try, or new angles on an existing problem.
We've got Michael Koziarski, a Rails Core Team member from Wellington, and Karl von Randow, a celebrated iOS developer from Auckland. Aaron Morton will be speaking about Cassandra (the database platform behind Reddit), Jared Wyles is delving into node.js, Jacinta Richardson is covering Perl and Richard Easther (head of Auckland University Physics) is talking about high-performance computing.
In the unlikely event of one of those session not quite suiting you, why not head into the 'unconference' area and start up a conversation of your own choosing? Maybe about something you just heard? Maybe about something you're working on now or something coming on the horizon like Windows 8?
And finally, to round off an amazing code-filled day, we have Mike Brown, creator of Webstock, talking about the responsibility we all share as software developers.
We guarantee you'll come away inspired after listening to these speakers.
Be sure not to miss out on this unique opportunity to upskill and network with your peers in various developer communities. Codemania is being held at Rendezvous Hotel, from 9:00 (doors open at 8:00) to 5:30 on Friday 30th March. Tickets are $300 - group discounts are available, see https://codemania.co.nz for more details.
