Camping and Hacking

Spent last weekend out in the woods at Peter Miller’s awesome Central Coast Code Con. This is the second year we’ve done it. This time we went to the Basin Camp Ground in the Olney State Forest in the Wattagan Mountains. A beautiful setting.

I actually think the term “CodeCon”, despite is venerable lineage, is a bit unhelpful in terms of explaining to people where you were or what you were doing. After all, what the heck does it mean? I thought a bit about how we could improve it:

Hacking in the Forest — That’s pretty good, and pretty much what we did for the weekend. But last year we went to the beach. Hm.
Camping and Hacking — Not bad, if somewhat less catchy. But last year we were hardly roughing it - we went to a campground up the Central Coast of NSW that had showers and electrical outlets. Oh well. I guess being in a trailer campground is some people’s idea of roughing it. (Electricity, of course, is somewhat important to recharge the laptops and to run the projector at night. This year Peter arranged for a small generator which was astonishingly quiet).
Hackfest by the Campfire — Ok, so long as people don’t get the notion that they are supposed to throw their laptops onto the fire or something…

One of the features of a CodeCon is that people do short informal presentations of something interesting they’re working on. We had a good crowd. Highlights: Erik de Castro Lopo talked about OCaml; Robert Collins showed us a new unit test suite for python he had madly hacked away on over the weekend. Silvia Pfeiffer talked about the future of Annodex which led to an awesome discussion about growing open source communities. Peter Miller showed us the tiny version control system he wrote to be the back end of a wiki he wrote called “quickie” (awesome name, dude). I described the configure-for-Java thing I’ve been working on. Conrad Parker gave us a demo of melting his shoes in the fire.

On Saturday we went for a hike up a picturesque (if somewhat hilly) section of the Great North Walk which was great exercise.

AfC

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