10,000 app devs SLEEP together in four-day code-chat-drink tech orgy camp London's O2 is this week hosting Campus Party - a four-day tech-fest during which as many as 10,000 software developers from across Europe get together for coding, talking and drinking. The marketing people like to call it Glastonbury For Geeks. Campus Party does have tents – three and a half thousand of them, two geeks to a …
.. and I could improve the quality of the level of coding overnight.
Real developers code .. wannabes attended corporate sponsored events where they blow smoke up their collective arses, before deciding that code development is hard work and that they want to be project managers or scrum team leaders to advance their careers.
Have you read the precis for the "Developer" track at this conference? Developers who are passionate about coding would not be attending this, it is all fluff no stuff. I'm sure it would be a great place to network, make contacts, get an internship as a "digital research assistant", but personally I'd rather be coding than spend time in "Developer 101" sessions. Here's a few gems:
"Ben currently runs European Marketing for cloud-communications startup Twilio. He will talk about the importance of seeing the world as a ‘software person’ and how we are halfway there" - Welcome to the "developer" track.
Keith is an award-winning mobile application developer. He will explain the first steps of iOS development in order to get to app store as an Apple OS developer - crikey, all that secret information - oh no, that's all on the ADC.
To Infinity And Beyond - The Story Of An Infinite Scroll with Liz Rice - wonder what Liz will talk about in the other 59 minutes of the talk.
Putting the entire slam on the "Developer" track is the description of it:
Creating a world out of ones and zeros, developers are the architects and designers of our online arenas. We will present the opportunity for coders and designers to gain skills from expert tutors in some of the world’s most renowned platforms, such as HTML5 and Javascript, as well as the chance to exercise their own talents. What is more, it will be possible to understand how anyone could learn the methods and skills needed to create these web-environments for themselves and thereby, essentially, build your own opportunities. This isn't an opportunity you can pass up.
So there you have it, this isn't an event for developers, it's an event for media/marketing types to dabble a bit in programming and "entrepreneur" their ridiculous ideas without involving actual developers.
Of course if coders such as yourself got out a little and mingled with the terrible, terrible non-coders, then we may end up with interfaces that actually make sense, instead of being the utter cluster fuck monstrosities we have to often put up with, just because, well who knows why.
Events like these aren't about the 'Quality' by which I presume you mean bug count, comment level, fit to the original spec configuration control etc,etc
It's about 'Elegance' You did that how? Cool;
It's about 'Fluency' in the tools used that thes guys can be so productive in such a short time
and most of all,
It's about 'Enthusiasm and Passion' for one of the many skills that is vital for the future of all of us..
So put you're steam roller back in the barn and give the kids a break ..
There is no elegance in any of the modern open source stuff I have looked at with very few exceptions.
(Not the fashionable stuff anyway. The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries are elegant and not that old.)
The GNU stuff is certainly not elegant. (libast and UWIN are quite good. If something is elegant I think anybody who is reasonably familiar with the language should be able to read it and understand it straight away. (Even if they couldn't write it themselves)).
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I can, but why should I have to?
Normally these days (since pop-up blockers built in to browsers anyway) adverts are easy enough to ignore. And without them the Reg wouldn't exist, so I'm normally happy to have them there.
But not when they make actually reading the website an unpleasant experience.
As we know, they never surface during daylight hours, nor actually socialize, it is a shame you cannot hear the clickety-clickety of all the keyboards being typed on.
alternatively, they all said screw-it and are at the local pub.
Though the way the piece was written, it reminded me somewhat of the phrase... "one time at band camp"
...where real developers develop real things:
ICMP6: (tiny camp 150 people, Germany)
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=icmp6
OHM2013: (much larger, The Netherlands)
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=ohm2013
Such things need to grow organically. This is just a marketing exercise.
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