CodeMash 2009, the third annual Ohio conference (and as far as I know, the largest Ohio developers’ conference), was by all accounts a great success last week. I was privileged to be a speaker at the show but also got a lot of value out of the networking opportunities and other sessions. Mary Poppendieck was also speaking, and it was great to get the opportunity to meet her and her husband Tom, as their books on Lean Software Development have been very valuable to me. I finally met David Laribee, also speaking, for the first time as well. It’s very impressive the kind of draw CodeMash has, and this year the event was sold out or even a bit over-sold, with many of the sessions standing-room only (and not many empty seats in the dining area).

I really enjoyed the Thursday evening party as a networking event. There were not too many people, and many of them I’ve met at previous CodeMash events or other local events. There were a few RockBand games going on off to the side, as well as a jam session for those with musical talent, including Carl Franklin and Dustin Campbell (but sadly not me). It’s rare that you’ll find a party with several hundred people that still feels like you know a lot of the people, and the music is great but not so loud that you need to yell to have a conversation. It will be challenging to maintain that aspect of the event if it continues to grow year after year.

My session was on Web Application Performance and Scalability. I focused more on general web and HTTP performance tips and tricks for this talk than my usual focus on tuning ASP.NET apps specifically. CodeMash is meant to include developers from all backgrounds, so I wanted to be sure the content was applicable to Ruby, Java, PHP, or any other kind of web developers. The timeslot was cut from 75 down to 60 minutes, so the content is a little smaller than usual and I only had a couple of demos (and no time to walk through the details of the demos – but these were ASP.NET specific so I didn’t want to spend too much time on that anyway). For those who attended, I appreciated the many questions and comments that were offered during the talk – feel free to add any additional comments here.

You can download the slides and demos, including the AJAX Asynch Loading demo, from the link below:

Improving Web Application Performance and Scalability