Today, Mary and I went to something called the Silicon Valley Code Camp. It’s a free, two day conference “by and for the developer community.” It’s basically a bunch of sessions about various aspects of software development, from Microsoft’s .NET to Google’s KML. There were multiple, concurrent sessions through the weekend, and a free lunch was provided by Microsoft. The sessions were presented by developers with varying experience in development and presentation skills. Mary and I only attended 2 sessions.

The first session was “Programming for Children” presented by Edward Cherlin. The session was supposed to introduce us to the XO Laptop from One Laptop Per Child. The XO is targeted to “provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.” You can read more about the XO on the OLPC website and the OLPC wiki. You can donate an XO and get one for yourself by clicking on the “give 1 get 1″ logo. There are other ways to contribute as well.

From the session description, we expected to get the answers to the following questions:

• What kind of content is needed, and what is the process for creating it?
• What is the process for Sugarizing existing software?
• How will the children adapt software to their needs, and learn to write more?

Unfortunately, the presenter was not very focused. He kept getting easily sidetracked and it didn’t help that a few people in the audience would ask questions that would get him further off topic. About all we did learn is that Edward Cherlin is a well intentioned but very odd individual. I suppose we did get some background on the OLPC project, but most of that is on the wiki. On the bright side, we did have an opportunity to touch and feel an XO laptop in person. There’s a picture of Mary with the XO on on the left.

The second session was “Design Patterns - What They Are and Why You Should Care” by Fletcher Johnson. This was a much better presentation than the first one. In fact, the presenter even taught at San Jose State University for a time, so he is a well seasoned lecturer. According to Wikipedia, a design pattern is “a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design.” It’s a way to describe and classify a solution to common problems. One example given was imagine you are designing a 2 story building and you needed to figure out how people will got from one floor to the next. You could use stairs, escalator, elevator, etc. These are design patterns. The session focused on design patters as they pertain to object-oriented programming (OOP) where design patters typically show the relationships between classes or objects without specifying the final class or object. The lecture was well done, but I don’t have a lot of experience with OOP, so most of it was lost on me.