In my long and splendid career of software thingy-doing, I’ve learned that anytime you get more than a couple software devs in a room to talk about something, it turns into a software project. It could be something as simple as planning a movie outing:

Nerd 1: Let’s go to a movie.

Nerd 2: What movie?

Nerd 3: We could check Yahoo’s movie listings.

Nerd 2: Cool. I’ll start writing an app to scrape the Yahoo listings site.

Nerd 1: We could use Regex.

Nerd 3: Duh. We have to use Regex - what I’m worried about is how we’re going to display the results.

Nerd 1: RSS?

Nerd 2: RSS isn’t flexible enough for what I think we should do with this – let’s go with ATOM.

Nerd 1: Fine. But what about people who are going to view our scraped listings from their cell phones? Wouldn’t it be cool if they could get movie listings while they’re already in line for the movie for which they want listings?

Nerd 3: Totally. But where are we going to host it?

Nerd 2: Hey – weren’t we planning on going to a movie?

Nerd 3: Dude… off topic. We’ll never get this done if you want to keep taking breaks.

And so on.

Today was similar. I met up with Stuart, Jason, and Rich to plan the upcoming Portland Code Camp. I think we spent about 3% of the time discussing the meat of the event, and the remainder (whatever that is – I’m not a bloody mathematician) talking about all the software we’re going to write to create the infrastructure.

At this point, we’ve determined that we’re going to need two-thousand load-balanced web servers, sixty-four petabytes of external storage, three anti-matter positron emitting diode lasers, and a donkey/banana hybrid cyborg battlebot (with optional mind-control satellite). This leaves $36.72 in our budget to create a memorable experience for the attendees, and we’ve decided to spend that on hiring a clown for three hours. It’s going to rock.

But seriously, yo, if you live in the Pacific Northwest and would like to attend a two day festival of peace, love, and donkey/banana hybrid cyborg battlebots, then you should seriously consider getting your tuckus to the Code Camp.

We’re also taking submissions for talks, and the tracks are pretty diverse. This won’t be your usual gathering of nerds. Whether your interest is coding games, coding to weird LED interfaces, or just hooking up to a database and yanking out some data, there’ll be a track to cover you.

Another cool thing about Code Camp is that it’s a somewhat informal affair which means that we aren’t necessarily looking for Experts and Gurus (although we’ll definitely have ‘em). If you’ve never spoken before, and if you would like to get your start, then submit your topic (submission details are on the Portland Code Camp page). There’s even going to be a Train the Presenter thing going on, so you can get pointers on how to deliver an effective presentation.

It’s going to be fun. Check it out.