I made it back alive from CodeMash

CodeMash was sweet.

So many other people are blogging about how awesome it was, I almost feel like I don’t need to mention it at all.

Any mention on the net is good, as long as they spell your name right. Meeting tons of people at CodeMash was a blast. Everyone was very down to earth. Keith was great to talk too. Catching up with Dustin Campbell was a blast as always. Of course talking with people I see more often like Bill Wagner, Josh Holmes, Jason Follas and Dianne Marsh was great too. It was great to talk with Richard Perry who is living in Detroit (well, Ferndale) who loves Detroit. I love Detroit too.

Bruce Eckel’s keynote was awesome. The non-codemash of software direction and burning man inspiration was awesome.

Neal Ford’s keynote was very fun. The Starbucks and Waffle House Domain Specific Languages are not to be forgotten.

Dave Donaldson represented NHibernate and I’ve very glad to see an open source .NET project get some exposure. I talked to a number of people who had never heard of NHibernate or Castle Project. I tried my best to explain to them what they were and of course talk them up as much as possible. I do happen to disagree with Dave when he says that LINQ is an ORM killer. LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities are just implementations of LINQ that happen to by ORMs themselves. There is nothing stopping the NHibernate community from creating LINQ to NHibernate. In fact, I’ve been thinking about how it could be done and I don’t think it would be too difficult.

I put some photos up on my flickr.

My camera was in the wrong mode for a number of the head shaving photos and I didn’t realize it until it was too late to capture the action. I love this picture of Josh and Brian just having their heads shaved and Josh just happens to be standing such that the projector is displaying “codemash” on his forehead. It was a very fun coincidence.

Did I mention that Richard Perry is a lot of fun?

It was also great hanging out with Richard Harding and Mark Ramm. Mark always has the most interesting and outrageous stories.

If you didn’t make it to codemash, I’m sorry to tell you that you REALLY missed out. I look forward to seeing you at the next one.