I am sitting at the Cleveland airport right now, waiting for my flight back to Dallas. I spent the last 3 days at the CodeMash conference held at the Kalahari resorts in Sandusky, Ohio. This was the biggest (and longest) conference that I have been to. It was exhilarating to be surrounded by and talk to such passionate developers. You could feel the high energy levels throughout the conference. Some of the highlights for me were:

• Bootstrapping your business session with Nate Kohari and James Avery: I have great respect for entrepreneurs, and more so for those with a coding background. Nate and James shared things that worked for them in their ventures, and a lot of things that didn’t. The session was very interactive, and a great start to the conference for me.
• Ruby/IronRuby: One of my goals for going to CodeMash was to decide if I am going to spend any significant amount of time trying to learn Ruby/IronRuby this year. The passion that a lot of the developers (especially the EdgeCase folks)  had for Ruby was definitely contagious and hard to ignore. I ended up attending a couple of Ruby sessions and I hope to spend more time with it in the next couple of months. The best Ruby session for me was “Ruby and Rails for the .Net developer” by Matt Yoho.
• Meeting more geeks: I got to meet a bunch of great people I knew from twitter, and some more.
• Amazon Ninja puzzles: Amazon had the best vendor booth IMO. They had programming related puzzles for you to solve, and I found myself in front of the question board every few hours (even missed some sessions because of this :). This is me hacking away in the halls with the Amazon Ninjas next to my laptop.
• Enter the Haggis concert: There was a live concert by Enter the Haggis on Thursday night, and they played some great fusion music. This was an awesome way to unwind.

There was plenty of food and caffeine at the conference, though the Wifi could have been better. Thanks to all the organizers for doing such a great job. I hope to be there again next year.