Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

I attended CodeCon 2009 this year, along with two friends from Canberra. This is an event where you go camping in a nice out-of-the-way location with no internet connection, take along your laptop, and hack away on code. There's lots of talk, lots of coding, enough seeing and walking and doing to keep the various personalities interested, and lots of sharing of ideas and thoughts. Peter Miller organises it, including hiring a generator and bringing along a bunch of tarps, poles, cables, and other stuff to make it all work - he does a splendid job and gives a lot of his time to making sure it all runs smoothly.

My feelings, coming back from the event, are overwhelmingly positive. This is the sort of affirming event that LCA is to me - talking to people who share the same jokes and ideas and worries, being able to help as well as ask for it, and realising that there are people of all ages who enjoy both geeking out and camping out. It's not for everyone - you have to be prepared to bring everything you'll need, cook your own meals, set up your tent and not have running water or a light at the reach of your hands. But obviously some people do enjoy it, and that's just fine by us.

Highlights for me were those belly laughs from brilliantly timed witticisms by other people; seeing a Lyrebird about 20 metres away (thanks, Kate, for lending me your small binoculars); getting a whole bunch of coding done; those quiet times discussing how life works; and how, sometimes, you just have to be a bit patient to wait for the annoyances to move off.

This isn't really a hour-by-hour account, as I'm not sure that kind of write-up would do it justice. But it was really great, and if you're at all interested in camping and hacking on code then it's well worth making the effort to go to. You don't really need access to the internet to get things done!

(I should investigate the possibility of running something similar at the Yarrangobilly Caves - thermal springs ahoy!)