Silicon Valley Code Camp
27, 28 October 2007 - Saturday and Sunday
Foothill College Campus
http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/

This was another "unconference", meaning that it is volunteers organizing and speaking, and fully free to attend. Unlike the other unconferences, this one is all about code, virtually no sales/marketing talks and very little UI design or project management discussions.

This is the second year in a row that Code Camp has been held at Foothill, and everyone seemed really happy to be here! They scheduled the talks with very long breaks in between, and Microsoft generously provided lunch. This encouraged lots of networking. It was great to see current and former students here too.

"The XO Laptop" laptop.org
There was a man at Code Camp with this amazing little plastic laptop made especially for children in the developing world. Starting Nov 12, you can spend $400 to get two of these laptops: one for your child and one for a child in the developing world. There are lots of high fliers on the board of this organization, called "One Laptop per Child". Given a tool like this, the creativity of a child is endless and would definitely change the world.

"JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford
Over two hours about how to write a good quality program using this poor quality language. Crockford is definitely a JavaScript guru, and he gave us some great advice that I can apply in other languages as well:
-always use break with switch
-always use {} with control statements, even when not necessary
-don't line up {}, instead use K&R style
-never use ++ or --
In general, he said to never be clever. Instead write the most clear and simple code, best comments, and don't cut corners to be cute. It's not worth it!

I need to study:

• Flanagan is Crawford's favorite JavaScript book.
• lambda is his favorite feature of JavaScript
• I need to understand more about closures
• "arguments" is an array of all arguments passed into a function
• JSlint.com has a great debugging tool

Crockford echoed another genius programmer's pronouncement that "It's REALLY hard to write good JavaScript programs!" I see that he has a lot of good tips on his website:
http://crockford.com/

"KML Google Maps Mashup" by Van Riper
KML is a flavor of XML that allows you to plot points on a Google map overlay. I have created Google maps in JavaScript before, but I never knew that plotting points was as easy as writing an XML file. I wish that he had gone into how to plot routes, but he didn't. There is a KML support group, and an active community of users that are anxious to share their information. This would be useful for the bike route maps that I discussed on my previous post from the ATE conference.

"Software Engineering Best Practices for the Web 2.0 World" by Joseph Kleinschmidt
This was all stuff I had heard before. I am just happy to know that practices like test driven development, well written documentation, and serious code reviews are no longer considered radical.

It was very difficult for me to go in to Foothill on the weekend, but it was worth it! Sitting in rooms listening to lectures also gave me a lot of sympathy for my students, and hardened my resolve to get my students to be active learners, solving problems and working on projects instead of just listening to me talk.