Zachariah Young

Well I must say I had a rock star weekend.  I was joined by Jeremy Sharp and Philip Sparks.  We were able to do Austin in 48 hours--- leaving Saturday night at 11:30 PM and returning back in Springdale at 8:00 AM.  Fun Fun

Eating was good.  The first night we ate at Chuy's.  This place was the best.  We had to travel down 6th Street,  which was an eye opening experience, to get to the restaurant.  I would recommend this place to anyone.

The code camp was awesome.  I went six different sessions and learned a lot.  The one I enjoyed the most was the Fish Bowl talk on TDD and BDD.  I was able to experience the same pain of others, when learning these new methodologies.  I meet two guys willing to help Jay and I on the Hermes Reader.  Their names are Chad Myers and Derick Bailey.  I'm really looking forward to learning from them.

To end the great weekend we meet a guy by the name of Gordon Montgomery.  He was also rock star status.  This guy was from Ireland and had stories of all kinds.  It was really cool just lightening to him talk.

Trip

Michael Paladino and I went down to the Dallas TechFest.  We had a really good time.  Like always we talked about technology all the way down and back.  It was exactly 666 miles round trip.  With the cost of gas at about $3.50 and my car getting 30 MPG, our gas cost was about $75 and hotel was about $50.  Not too bad for a trip to Dallas in 24 hours.

One of the neat things about the TechFest was meeting the guys at .Net Rocks.  I got to talk to Carl for about five minutes during sessions breaks.  Really neat to put a voice to a face.

One of the other things that I saw, was the difference between the Java and .Net communities.  We had both groups at the TechFest.  At one point during the conference, everybody was standing in front of Microsoft's booths and nobody in front of Sun's booth.  Not sure why it was, but it was just amazing to see how the Microsoft community has grown.

The session I liked the most was on Instant Web Applications with ASP.NET Dynamic Data by Jason Kergosien.  ASP.NET Dynamic Data is a scaffolding framework used to build data driven web applications.  The biggest question that I have, is how does this work with Behavior Driven Design?  I hope to ask this question in Austin when I go to the Austin Code Camp in a couple weeks.

Lastly when taking a road trip like this, it allows you to eat at some place new.  We chose to eat at Big Foot BBQ in Caney, Oklahoma.  They had really good baked beans.

General, Trip