Twas the night before code camp...

No more messing around - tomorrow is the first VT code camp. We've got everything as done as we can at this point. Excellent speakers/sessions lined up, a kickin' venue, a good team of volunteers and lots-o-swag. We've got over 100 people who have registered to attend, which far exceeds my expectations. I think I'm probably on the record somewhere stating that for our first code camp 50-70 would be a great turn out but talk of 100 was fantasy.

Looks like I was wrong. Happily, happily wrong.

Seriously, for this event to have that many people register is a huge testament to the development community in VT and the northeast in general (we've got participation from as far away as PA and NYC).

I'm super pleased with the support we've received from our donors, too. The UVM School of Business Administration has opened their doors to us for the venue. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is covering breakfast, MyWebGrocer (my employer) is buying pizza and soda for lunch and Microsoft is providing an afternoon snack.

Chris Pels and the http://www.thedevcommunity.org/ site helped us by managing our registration and speaker abstract submissions which was HUGE.

We've a pile of swag to raffle and give away, too. Donors are:

• aspNetPro Magazine
• CODE Magazine
  
• DevExpress
  
• David & Julie Yack
• JetBrains
  
• Microsoft
• MyWebGrocer
• O'Reilly Media
• Pearson Books
• PluralSight
• TechSmith
• telerik
• Wiley/WROX Publishing

It takes a lot of people to get an event like this off the ground and we have a great team. Super big thanks go to Bradley Holt, Carl Lorentson, Julie Lerman, Laura Blood, Margot Schips, Martin Stevanof, Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Rob Rohr who did a lot of heavy lifting to get us poised for a successful event tomorrow.

I also got some wonderful advice about organizing a code camp from Chris Bowen and Jim O'Neil our regional Microsoft development evangelists and also from Dennis Perlot and Supriyo "SB" Chatterje from the CT code camp. These four guys provided some good input and are all class acts.

Finally, I wouldn't even be able to be involved in this kind of community development if it weren't for my wife, Sue, who will be taking care of the kids while I'm at the code camp. So she gets a thank you, too.

So that's it. Everything is printed, the alarm is set and I'm really very, very excited to see how we do.