We had quite the whirlwind weekend. Looks like about 650 people came Saturday and about 450 on Sunday with well over 100 sessions. A big thank you to all the volunteers, speakers and sponsors. You guys are the life blood of camp and from the comments I heard walking around, all our hard work was appreciated.
That's right a big thank you to everybody that helped in making this edition of SVCC the best so far, I'm looking forward with eager anticipation to the next one. The variety of topics was also a key point, the camp even had a Hackathon4Kids event, where youngsters between 8 and 13 could get their first steps into programming. As mentioned earlier on this blog, there were 8 Groovy related talks, all of them with a good level of attendance a lots of questions. I'm still surprised that many Java developers are not aware of Groovy, even at Silicon Valley's heart, despite that they reacted in a very positive way to it and I think we may have gained new polyglot programming adepts for the JVM
(after all they happily swallowed the Red Pill) 
Here is my recollection of what happened both daysSaturday
Woke up very early in the morning as Ixchel and I signed for volunteer work at the registration desk. We arrived just in time after Peter and other volunteers were setting up the tables, coffee and donuts. Almost two hours later of wading through de-alphabetized tag names (we kind of made a mess the first hour or so, lots of people!) it was time for the first session, unfortunately Paul didn't make his flight connection on time, meaning that his Groovy Tutorial got rescheduled for Sunday (yay!), also meaning that now we were able to attend Alex's talk on FEST. It was a good one (as always), a lot of questions too. Once it finished I heard someone asking about UI testing on the android platform and if FEST was able to do it. Sadly the answer is no as FEST is Swing based, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone takes the initiative to replicate FEST's approach for android.Then it was time for my first talk (Java2D and Groovy, a perfect match). As expected many of the attendees didn't know about Groovy before, so the time was split evenly between Groovy, SwingBuilder and GraphicsBuilder. We broke for lunch, next up was my second talk of the day (Building Rich Applications with Groovy's SwingBuilder), during the time between sessions I stumbled upon my old JackBe colleagues (Deepak, Kishore & Girish, Raj made it later to the sessions). This talk was pretty much based on the one Danno and I did at JavaOne 2008, except it had a bit more of Groovy intro and a very special treat at the end, a glimpse of Griffon, by creating a sample app right there under 5 mins, adding the binding example that was previously discussed on that talk
(btw I also demoed the Griffon version of GraphicsPad, including svg import/export support).It is time for a pause, attended Kishore's Building and Sharing Enterprise Mashups & Mashlets talk, which demonstrated how JackBe's Presto Mashup Server and EMML (Enterprise Mashup Markup Language) can be used to mash & publish new data based on disparate sources. These guys have done an amazing job, I caught a glimpse of what the platform could do before I left JackBe, I'm happy they reached the target, it looks very promising! Last talk spot of the day and I'm back in the driving seat (Boosting Your Testing Productivity with Groovy), a reprise of what I presented recently at GTAC 08, but this time I was able to discuss more about proxies (with Proxy-o-Matic) and building test data with ObjectGraphBuilder (code camp sessions are 75 mins long). Attendees got a good laugh when I touched the love/hate relationship between Java & XML, Groovy makes both kiss up and be happy
That was it for the day, couldn't make it to the BBQ that was taking place right afterward as we were completely depleted, drove home and crashed.Sunday
Woke up early again as we were on volunteer duty once more. Made it on time to help setup things and off we were giving badges and schedule updates. We decided to follow Paul all day, how could we miss the opportunity to learn from him? (btw he signed my copy of GinA, two more signatures to go, Andy I'm aiming for you!), so the day went as following: Agile Developer Practices for Dynamic Languages, Groovy and Concurrency, Groovy Tutorial and XML and Web Services with Groovy. Paul couldn't finish most of them on time, so many questions from the audience (yay!), besides there is a lot of stuff about Groovy that can't be covered on 75 mins sessions. Paul's concurrency session showed quite a few tricks you can use in Groovy, mostly coming from Java libraries, the one that shined most was the use of @Immutable (via AST transformations). We had time to chat during breaks and lunch, James Williams joined us for lunch (he was also following Paul, we Groovy devs tend to stick together 
). Sadly his Grails talk was scheduled at the same time as Paul's WebServices, though choice 
Drove home (with a quick stop at Circuit City to buy some RockBand drum sticks and drum noise dampers), uploaded a few pictures to Flickr and crashed.That was Code Camp for us, hope you had a great time as well this weekend! The slides for my talks can be found at the camp's wiki page (links on this post too), the code will follow shortly.
Keep on Groovying!
