Boise Code Camp 2.0: Post Mortem

It is finished. Now I don't expect a tearing of the cloth, but I do believe I hear angels singing. With a sign of relief I can now say Boise Code Camp 2.0 is over. Long live Boise Code Camp 3.0.

Overall, it went really well. At least I thought so.

* 215 people showed up. Not bad for a city the size of Boise.
* We had enough room for everyone -- thank you many times over Boise State University.
* We had enough pizza for everyone without a lot of left overs.
* Pizza was catered by the university, so they brought it in, set it up, and took it away. Nuf said.
* Plenty of sessions. We had 38 at last count. Pretty good for a one day event.
* All of the speakers had working laptops.
* Dinner was a little late...but not too bad.
* The sponsors were very happy with the turn out.
* I got to play RoboRally at the dinner.

Problems:
* We had one problem room where lights and projects all got poltergeist for a few sessions at the end (sorry to everyone at Martin Danner's presentation on VSTS Unit testing session -- we are going to try to do that again at a NetDug). But it was really funny when the lights would spontaneously turn off every time Doug Seven talked during the Software Quality panel.
* We still had a few scheduling problems. They did not go unnoticed. I believe all of the security sessions were at the end of the day.
* When doing the final raffle my dyslexia finally kicked in and I read a number backwards (I said 201 when it was 102). But all was well in the end, 201 was called for one of the grand prizes.

And my one session when well. Beginning MDX (an SQL like language for OLAP). I talked right to the end without going over, so that was good. But I didn't leave much time for questions at the end either.

Things I would like to change for next time:
* Get the wives involved earlier. Especially David Star's wife Eleanor. Lets just say she stepped in just in time. There is something about geek (or just men in general) that had organizing things. We would rather play with toys and talk. We need her, and Dawn McKeeth, again to pull this off well, and the sooner the better.

* Have it in March. We moved everything up to February this year. That was a minor mistake. But basically, nobody took it seriously until after New Year (actually, second week of January). And another month would have saved me a bit of stress.

* The web site. I'm going to burn the old one. We were better off with WordPress from last year. Problem was, while everyone was asking me for help with the web site, I couldn't do anything about it. For example, you had to be logged onto the machine to get a count of people who signed up. And WAY too many people put in tracks when the meant to put in a session.

* More non-Microsoft specific sessions. I'm not trying to knock Microsoft here (I've make my living off of Microsoft since 1997), but there are alternatives out there that have good market share and are worth learning. For example: Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, ColdFusion, Perl, Delphi,... All good technologies.

* Lastly, to give at least one non-Business Intelligence related talk. People are beginning to think that is all I do.