Code Camp

Today, I did something cool. I went to Charlotte Code Camp. It was pretty amazing. If it seems like I'm typing in a monotone... tone, it's because I'm tired. Code Camp really was awesome. We (my father and I) didn't really 'formally' sign up, because I went to the site too late, but we went anyway because a fraction of the people expected don't show up to events like these.

When we arrived, we got a schedule and several pieces of paper with the sponsors on them, which was completely interesting and definitely not a waste of ink and paper. So, I chose an event to go to, on XNA particle systems, which is basically programming things like snow, clouds of dust, and fire. I want to look into XNA because I'm really looking into game/app development as at least a hobby. It wasn't really as much of a tutorial as I would have hoped, but it gave me ideas about what I could do in the future. I also won a free textbook on C++ or C# or something like that, which I'm definitely reading later. At the same time, my dad was in a class on making Windows Phone 7 apps, which I want to look into as well. He got another textbook from that on how to make Windows Phone 7 apps, to be redundant.

Afterwards, we both went to a lecture on Netduino, a microcontroller like Arduino, but with more memory and arguably much better for the same price. The guy who gave it was pretty cool. He made a water jet by his pool powered by the Netduino. He could tap places on the pool from his phone for the water jet to squirt. He showed us a basic program made to blink an LED on and off, which I just learned how to do with the Arduino last Sunday. That code was shorter than the code for the Netduino, although they were both simple.

When that lecture was over, we went to lunch. They gave it to us for free. I'm sure you're interested in what I had. I had some macaroni and cheese, if I remember. I also had garlic bread and salad. They tasted like garlic bread and salad, respectively. They provided free soda, chips, and junk food. I got lots of each. If you read that paragraph, I can tell you two things: first, you are at least semi-literate, and, second, you probably have no life, like me, which is perfectly legitimate to some people, including, but not limited to, me.

After lunch, I went to a lab. It was about a tool called Microsoft LightSwitch. I made an application that basically took information about authors in a form-like way. It allowed you to pair them up with one or more books. Although it's nothing I would use normally, it was still interesting to learn and may serve a purpose some other time.

The last thing I went to was a lecture and demo on mobile sites. I learned several interesting things from that. First, Windows Phone 7 doesn't support touch in its browser, so you can't click on things with your finger normally. That eliminates any chance that I'm going to get one. I also learned that websites with mobile versions get bumped up in a Google or Bing search, which is cool because it makes more people want to create mobile sites. That was cool, and I just want any website developers (maybe me in the future) to know that they need to make more mobile sites, because barely any normal sites are user-friendly.

There was another section, but none of the classes during it interested me, so I sat in the car reading video game stuff on my phone and looking through the textbooks we got. I went back in, and they had a raffle for stuff. The first person to win got an Xbox with a Kinect, but there were two envelopes with keys to $2000 windows software he could have also chosen, but didn't. I can't say I would do differently, though, because I don't know enough about the software to be trusted with it. Overall, it was awesome, and I'm hoping to go next year.