The season of Code Camps continues to march on strongly. Three weeks ago, 16 March, Seminole State College hosted the 8th annual Orlando Code Camp. Here is a little trivia for you: it is the second largest Code Camp in the country. Sixty speakers converged from all over the country and delivered 81 sessions on vast variety of topics such as ASP.NET, Cloud, Windows 8, Windows Phone, Agile, JavaScript, HTML5, SharePoint, SQL Server, etc. The atmosphere was energetic and inspirational. Twitter hashtag #OrlanoCC was buzzing like never before. Over 550 passionate developers were going from one talk to another for seven consecutive sessions with only lunch break in between. The event culminated at 5pm with a prize giveaways and most notably the grand prize, Surface RT, won by a lucky attendee. Jeff, the ServerSilo rep, reminded everyone that even though a single person won the grand prize, everyone won a dinner at the Wing House where the after party sponsored by ServerSilo was going to kick off. He was right, we were all winners. Even those who could not make it to the after party. However, most speakers and many attendees did and had a great time decompressing after a long day of enjoying the food, drinks, and hanging out with like-minded geeks.

This year’s Code Camp was particularly dear to me. It was the first time I was a co-organizer unlike previous years where I volunteered only. Furthermore, I even delivered a talk on “UX Design Principles“. It was a hit. There was standing room only. The attendees genuinely enjoyed the talk judging by the questions and positive feedback I received after the talk. If you did not get a chance to see the talk in person, you can watch it online thanks to my talented videographer Ania. She spent entire day recording speaker interviews and at towards the end of the day she even found energy and motivation to record my talk. Thank you Ania!

Slides available for download here.

For the past three years the ONETUG board has had a vision of interviewing few prominent speakers and posting the videos online. Thanks to Brian and Ania this ambitious vision has been finally realized. They have single-handedly interviewed speakers, recorded and edited the videos. In the name of the entire ONETUG board I thank you for the excellent work you have done! All the videos are available for watching on the ONETUG youtube channel.