In comment to my Portland Code Camp 2.0, Jason Mauer, _the_ father of Northwest Code Camps, said there will be a Seattle Code Camp October 28/29 at the same location as last year (DeVry in Federal Way). Needless to say, I'll be there. I can't wait.

 

…was pretty good.

 Hi-lights:

• Scott’s Power Shell presentation. Filled a lot of cracks in the pavement of my power shell knowledge. Maybe this will get me using power shell more and I can reach critical mass.
• Wilco’s Iron Ruby presentation. I fealt dumb and lazy after this. How come I can’t build a compiler in a few months. I had the feeling, in this presentation, that I was in the presence of a future computer science super star.
• Jeff Berkowitz’s Poker Bot presentation. I wish this had lasted about 3 hours longer. Too bad I don’t actually know how to play poker. I may have understood more. Never the less, I knew enough to recognize some common patterns with securities trading. At a high level, it’s all about information theory. Just when we were getting to the good part, though, we had to break. I caught a glimpse of what looked like a hard coded strategy – from poker book strategy to C#. My next step would be to take a bunch of those strategies and put them in a genetic program, or even more like what I do, break them down by information atom and put them in a neural net to get weighted, running against Poker Academy. Poker Academy can’t beat the best players. Maybe it would be better to train bots against real poker game data, or on real online poker networks. Awesome presentation.

Low-lights:

• Too hot. Didn’t want to stay for outdoor BBQ. Bailed.
• Too short. Day 2 would have been good.
• The hotel I was looking forward to going to was full. We stayed in a really bad hotel and paid too much. Maybe planning ahead and making reservations is a good idea sometimes.

 

I sure hope we get to see another Seattle Code Camp, a *Con, or something along those lines before the year is over. If not, I might start driving to the Portland .NET users group meetings (in addition to ssdotnet.)