Tulsa School of Dev

Posted by on 17 Apr 2012 Go to original comments

Tulsa School of DevThis year's Tulsa School of Dev had lots of changes from last year.

  1. New event "chairperson" - Sean Whitesell
  2. New event venue - TCC Northeast Campus
  3. New event website platform - WordPress with custom plugins
  4. New event focus - "hands-on" content

First, the rough edges

For one, we (i.e., Tulsa Web Devs) didn't polish up the website as much as we should have. It was clumsy to do speakers, talks, and technologies with custom post types. I'm still looking for a good open-source lanyrd/eventbrite-type cms - anyone know of one?

TCC Northeast wasn't a good venue - the campus has a weird layout; the common area wasn't suited for lunch and rooms were far away from registration and not conducive to a good hallway track.

Aside from the above issues, I liked the event.

I especially liked mingling with the developers. I had a chance to meet Lindsey, Cory, and Matt from The Div and I hope we do many more events together. I also met Jesse Harlin who did a mobile HTML5 geolocating note app for the 2nd half of the web track. Tulsa Web Devs got together to watch the ustream of the April meeting of OKC.js - the group Jesse and Vance Lucas are running in OKC. I also rubbed shoulders with developers from outside our web community bubble - i.e., mostly Enterprise and Microsoft developers. I still wish there was more interaction between the two "camps" though, along with the sizable Java group in town.

Microsoft was really cool - they gave away a free Windows Phone to attendees who built and published a Windows Phone app that day. I may have to ask if we can give phones away at Tulsa Tech Fest to HTML5 mobile web app developers - let them pick between a B2G phone or a Windows Phone. ;)

I'm looking forward to next year's School of Dev. My notes for improvement:

  1. Improve the format preparation (talks in the morning, workshops in the afternoon?)
  2. Book a better venue
  3. Promote earlier

Most importantly, we'll keep bringing Tulsa area developers together!

Question or comment about this post? Tell me on GitHub.

Tulsa School of Dev / groovecoder by groovecoder is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA
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  1. Sean W 2012-04-17 18:54:30 -0500
    Thanks Luke for the write-up. The TCC NE campus was free. We only had to pay for the coffee. The rooms were free due to a grant that campus received a few years ago. I think the grant is over now though. We would have had better classroom locations if we can get the place just after classes let out for the semester or like spring break. Oh and a big "Thanks" to the web group. I appreciate the work done on the site. Though there were rough edges like you mentioned, it looked a lot better than it would have on our Sharepoint site.
  2. Dave Brondsema 2012-04-17 21:41:28 -0500
    Hey Luke, maybe check out http://indico-software.org/ for scheduling. I heard about it at PyCon. I don't know much about it, but the idea seems similar. Thanks for your last post too - it was the same week we were having a discussion about beer at BarCampGR.
  3. groovecoder 2012-04-18 01:06:16 -0500
    Sean, I didn't know TCC NE was free - that's cool. Good to know about using campuses during semesters. Have we ever tried to do an event at the library? Dave, nice! I'll have to check that out.
Tulsa School of Dev / groovecoder by groovecoder is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA