I recently attended CodeMash 2023 at Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, Ohio. This was my first time attending CodeMash and I was very impressed with the community, quality of talks, and overall experience the conference offered. This year's event had a vaporwave/80s theme which made for cool lighting and what felt like a huge main stage that had the vibe of a much larger conference. The theatrics were very impressive and super fun. There were lots of activities each night that was fun to participate in like live acoustic and electric music, lightning talks, and even Carnival Games and a Casino. Since it was such a great experience, I wanted to share some of my highlights in hopes it encourages others to attend in the future.
Personal Highlights
This was the first conference I've attended since the pandemic started so I was pretty excited to get back out there, meet some new people, and socialize in the developer community. Upon arriving Wednesday night, I was very impressed with the organizers as check-in was super easy and the conference center at Kalahari resort had lots of space to socialize. For a regional conference, you can tell the CodeMash organizers have a ton of experience in bringing people together and were able to do a lot with the smaller budget they had this year. A big highlight for that night was playing board games (it's a NimblePros thing 🎲) with Steve "Ardalis" Smith and some of the other attendees. I'm fairly new to the board game community so it was great to get some tips and tricks from Steve and the others although admittedly I don't think I was very good at the game! 😅
NimblePros Kyle McMaster (me), Jeremiah "Coop" Cooper, Steve "Ardalis" Smith 🎉
The other two days of the conference were packed with presentations that I'll cover in the next section but overall I think the biggest highlight of the conference was being able to socialize and meet so many people in the developer community. This conference made me appreciate the value of in-person events and networking opportunities. I enjoyed getting to experience a lot of the speakers whose talks I may have seen online as the talks felt more candid and personal attending them in person. It was great to see Steve Smith present in person for the first time as his presentation skills are absolutely amazing and you can tell he has experience in front of bigger crowds. I also enjoyed meeting some of the speakers and seeing people I've met remotely and getting to know them a little better. I went out of my way to make an effort to try to catch a few of the speakers and ask questions or give praise on their talks. It's always humbling how approachable and friendly most of the icons in the .NET space are. Shoutout to Jimmy Bogard, Derek Comartin, and Cameron Presley for their time engaging in discussions with me. It was great to add that human element to a lot of the names and faces I've seen online over the years and I'm looking forward to seeing them again at future conferences.
Top talks I enjoyed
These are the talks I enjoyed the most but by no means take away from the quality and value of the other talks I attended. I've included links to the talks on the CodeMash website in my full schedule below and I highly recommend catching the speakers at a conference if you have the chance.
Aerospace Engineering for Computer Scientists by Ilyana Smith
Personally, this was my favorite talk of the conference as I am a huge space and physics nerd. 🚀🤓 Ilyana is a former NimblePro and it was great to see her talk about her experiences working in the aerospace industry at NASA. It was very interesting to see some of the parallels in software and aerospace engineering as well as some of the unique constraints of software in space. I'd love to see more talks like this in the future as I think it's a great way to show how software engineering can be applied to a wide variety of industries.
Neurodiversity, Productivity, and Communication – A Survival Guide by Cassandra Faris
Communication is such an important skill in the workplace and something that I've been trying to improve on over the past few years. This talk was a great reminder of the importance of understanding who your audience is and tailoring your communication style to them whenever possible. The speaker presented some great tips presented in this talk on how to maximize productivity by understanding one's own abilities and how to overcome any challenges there. There were a lot of aspects of this session that I could empathize with and the personal stories shared by the author in this talk helped drive home the importance of effective communication and empathy in the workplace.
Level Up on Functional Programming By Rebuilding LINQ By Cameron Presley
This talk was a great introduction to functional programming practices and the inner working of LINQ. LINQ is one of my favorite language features in C# so I was very curious about this talk and it did not disappoint. It started with a brief history of C# and some of the language features that allow for LINQ to exist. I recommend this talk to any C# developer who is curious about learning more about functional programming as well as any developer who is looking to level up their knowledge about the C# language and the implementation of LINQ.
Observability Made Easy with .NET 7 and OpenTelemetry by Jimmy Bogard
I've seen this talk on YouTube a few times and it was great to experience it in person. Jimmy is a great speaker and this talk demonstrated the value of establishing observability in your applications, especially if they are distributed. OpenTelemetry is something I've been trying to utilize more as a .NET developer and it was great to see how easily it can be integrated with services like Application Insights, DataDog, etc. I'm looking forward to seeing how these features evolve in future versions of .NET.
Full Schedule of Talks I Attended
There are quite a large number of talks for each time slot, so I had to be selective in what I attended but one of the upsides of this is that each time slot seemed to offer a little something for everyone. I mostly focused on talks that were related to .NET, architecture, and soft skills/productivity with a few exceptions.
Thursday
Observability Made Easy with .NET 7 and OpenTelemetry
Neurodiversity, Productivity, and Communication – A Survival Guide
Finding Patterns in the Clouds
Principles of Code - Five Key Points to Better Systems
Don't put your messages in a bottle; Implement messaging patterns
Code Review is an Architectural Necessity
Friday
Aerospace Engineering for Computer Scientists
Vertical Slice Architecture, not Layers!
Improving the Design of Existing Software
Level Up on Functional Programming By Rebuilding LINQ
Final Thoughts
Overall, CodeMash 2023 was a great conference and it really surprised me that such a high-quality conference can happen in Northern Ohio in the middle of January. 🥶 The organizers did an absolutely amazing job with the limited budget and resources they had this year. As a first-time attendee, my expectations were exceeded and wouldn't have even guessed there were any constraints had the organizers not been so transparent about how they planned the conference and how the budget works. This transparency was refreshing to see and I applaud the organizers for their honesty. One thing I wanted to mention is how family-friendly the conference is and although my little one is currently too young for the KidzMash, I plan on bringing the family to future CodeMash events when she is old enough to participate and enjoy Kalahari. In the end, I had a great time attending the conference with some of my fellow NimblePros and I'm looking forward to attending again in the future. I hope to see you there!