Chris Risner . Com

CodeMash 2012

Posted on: 1/20/2012 12:37:00 AM by Chris

Last week was CodeMash 2012. This was the seventh iteration of the conference and the first time I’ve been back since the first year. If there is one thing that I can attest to, having missed the 5 years in between, this conference has gotten a lot bigger. To put things in perspective (since I don’t have the actual number of attendees from 2007), CodeMash 2007 (the first year) cost $35,082.83. This year (2012), they spent $22,400 on BACON! I only wish I could spend this much on pig. This year there were roughly 1200 attendees and 130 speakers.

Thankfully, after submitting a few different session abstracts, I was chosen to speak on an Introduction to Android Development. While I wasn’t really prepared to speak on the topic when I was accepted, in-between then and the conference, I wrote my 31 Days of Android series. After having written that, I was more than prepared to create the presentation and speak about it confidently. I was still a little nervous as this would be the largest crowd of people (that I didn’t already know) that I would be speaking to. That said, things went pretty well. I had one of the largest rooms at the Kalahari conference center (outside of the ballrooms). While it wasn’t jam packed, I’d say there were probably about 100 people give or take a few.

My talk did run a little too long on the slides and I didn’t have quite enough time to walk through a demo (which was mostly going to consist of some very basic Android stuff). However, I received a lot of positive feedback after the presentation and was able to hang out afterwards and answer some great questions from some of the attendees. I’m really happy I was accepted and was able to talk at the conference and I hope to be able to speak at future CodeMash conferences.

You can download the slides from my presentation here. As always, if you have any feedback or questions, please let me know.

Categories: Android, Bacon, Conferences

First Article

Speaking at CodeMash and OneDevDay Detroit

Posted on: 10/29/2011 8:38:00 PM by Chris

CodeMash 2011

Recently, I finally got off my ass and volunteered to speak at a few sessions. By volunteered, I mean I submitted abstracts and was selected, so that’s pretty awesome. The two conferences I’m going to be speaking at will be CodeMash and 1DevDayDetroit.

CodeMash is a relatively new conference that started in 2007. I actually attended the conference the first year they had it but haven’t been back since. Where most conferences deal with a “limited” selection of technology (i.e. Microsoft has conferences regarding Microsoft stuff, Google has Google ones, etc), CodeMash covers a wide variety of technologies from Java to .Net, PHP to Ruby, and more. Attending this conference really gives developers the chance to see what else is out there and how other people do things. This year, CodeMash opened registration on October 24th (at 10:24 AM mind you) and sold out after 20 minutes. Considering that this conference isn’t fronted by any huge technology company and isn’t what you think of when you think “Huge Product Release”, this is pretty incredible. I’ll be doing a presentation on the Introduction to Android Development. This session is going to be meant for people that haven’t done mobile development before. It will cover the basics of Android development, the tools necessary, and how the Android Marketplace works. As I’ve been doing a good amount of Android development, I’m pretty excited to be giving this presentation at what’s quickly becoming a pretty big conference. CodeMash is going down in Sandusky, Ohio on January 11th – 13th.

The second conference, 1DevDayDetroit, is a smaller conference that is, obviously, in Detroit. This is a smaller and newer conference that focuses on getting the development community in Metro Detroit together to share and learn about different technology programs. At this conference I will be speaking on Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM) for Android. This is a bit more of an advanced Android topic and I’m really looking forward to it as it will be my first conference presentation. This conference is taking place at the Compuware building in Detroit on November 4th and 5th.

If you’re attending either of these conferences, stop by for my presentation and let me know how it was.

First Article