What’s common between 350 Mountain Mike’s Pizza, 920 Erik’s Deli Sandwiches, 29 huge jugs of Peet’s Coffee, and 194 geek sessions ?
It takes 1876 developers, hackers, architects, technology honchos etc to consume all of them over a weekend 
Yes, we are talking about Silicon Valley Code Camp 5.0!
This is a for the developer community, by the developer community, and to the developer community event focused on Agile, Cloud, HTML5, Google Developer Tools & Platforms, Java, Web services, and many other topics. The code camp website shows attendance records from the previous years as:
A slightly updated view of this data is:
As you can see, there is steady year/year growth in the number of sessions, registration, and attendance. This year specifically has seen about 60% growth on registrations and 80% on the actual attendance. The ratio between registered/attended was also steady for the first few years and has also gone higher this year. This event has truly grown organically over the past years and is the second biggest conference, with Java focus, in the USA after JavaOne! Oracle certainly was a platinum sponsor of this conference. Are there any other bigger conferences that I don’t know of ? 
It would be interesting to revisit this pattern if the event starts charging a nominal (may be optional) fees from all the attendees. However the main website highlights three points:
- by/for the developer community
- always free
- never occur during work hours
GlassFish team presented several sessions at the Code Camp:
- Java EE 6: Doing More with Less
- Java EE 6 Tooling
- Introduction to JAX-RS
- Servlets 3.0: Asynchronous, Extensible, Easy-to-use
- OSGi and Java EE in GlassFish
- Running your Java EE 6 applications in the Cloud
I could not deliver #5 due to a conflict but slides from all the sessions are now available:
Here are some key pointers for you:
- Download/Participate in GlassFish community at glassfish.org
- Download/Participate in NetBeans community at netbeans.org
- GlassFish Videos: youtube.com/GlassFishVideos
- NetBeans Videos
Check out the complete list of sessions by Oracle at the Code Camp. Please enter session evaluations at http://siliconvalley-codecamp.com/SessionsOverview.aspx (make sure you are logged in and then click the link at the end of the session you attended that says ‘Evaluate’).
The Android App was pretty useful, did not try the iPhone App. I wonder if there was a session on "How I created the Android/iPhone App"
Personally, this was my fourth code camp (2009, 2008, 2007) and I enjoyed meeting the local geek community. I could barely spend Saturday morning at the code camp and delivered two of my sessions but its always fun to meet the usual suspects. Many thanks to Peter Kellner, Van Riper, Tammy Baker, Kevin Nilson, other organizers, and many other volunteers for running a great show!
Couple of suggestions for next year …
- Expose the RESTful API for the code camp registration/session/speaker/etc data and organize a competition on the best created app. May be a panel with different attendees who attempted to build this application ?
- Make sure the speakers are not running across the campus between their back-to-back talks.
Check out some of the pictures:
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And the complete photo album:
Technorati: conf svcc javaee6 glassfish netbeans eclipse intellij cloud osgi servlets restful
Arun, it is people like you that make people like me keep wanting to put this event on. Year after Year after Year. As long as we have great speakers like you, we will have great sponsors and it will stay free!
BTW, if you want me to do math for you, just call. For the future, 87+3 is 90 so you don’t have to ask again
Comment by Peter Kellner — October 15, 2010 @ 5:32 pm