This Saturday was the first ever Palouse Code Camp, hopefully the first is a long line. We'd been planning it seriously for 8 months or so, though we'd been knocking the idea around for over a year. We did not draw the crowd we'd hoped for (we had ~30 people), so it was a very small event, but those who attended seemed to enjoy the event, so I think it still needs to be counted a success. Our largest failure in advertising was clearly with the students, as we had virtually no student representation, something which we've identified ways to fix for next year. Our sponsorship was also dramatically lower than we'd hoped, but generous donations from Microsoft and WSU's Social & Economic Sciences Research Center ensured that all our expenses for the year were covered, even leaving us a bit left over to keep us afloat until we start fundraising for next year (which will start much sooner).

We really appreciated all our speakers, Jack Stephens from Spokane, gave a sort of overview of LINQ, using part of it from his talk on using LINQ with DataSets. Dave Sargent, an organizer, who talked about Website Performance (based in part on a talk I gave a few years ago) and MS SQL Server Administration. WSU Professor Robert Lewis with is Introduction to Python talk, which I think has finally convinced Catherine that she really ought to learn Python for her research work. Mithun Dhar, our regional Developer Evangelist from Microsoft, came out to talk about some of what Microsoft is doing in the near term, and to give all our attendees a free month of Windows Azure service. Jason Hurdlow, organizer, redid his XSLT talk, focusing this time a bit more on XPath, I think.

However, I want to give a very special thanks to Mark Michaelis, who volunteered to do "as many talks as we needed", and gladly gave us four. MSBuild, Powershell, MVVM with WPF, and Pragmatic Unit Testing. I didn't get a chance to attend any fo Mark's talks, but I do believe they were very well attended. We'd only made contact with Mark a bit over a week from the event, and his support was amazing.

Myself, I gave two talks. The first, was an update of my Introduction to YUI3 talk I gave at Portland Code Camp earlier this year, updated for YUI 3.2.0 (and of course, YUI 3.3.0pr1 was tagged in git today). I had around ten people, and amazing turnout given the size of the event, and was ecstatic. This talk focused more on SimpleYUI, but I made sure to touch on the Module pattern, as I'm still not entirely comfortable with SimpleYUI. The code is up on GitHub, and the slides are on SlideShare. For those who attended the talk, I'd really appreciate any ratings you can provide.

My second talk was about the YUI3 Component Framework and module creation, and it only had a single attendee, but he was willing to stay, and I wanted to talk about it, so I went ahead. Slides here.

We learned a lot to improve for next year, and a lot of the groundwork is done, so I fully expect to have a good success in 2011.