What an amazing world we live in today.  I just went to my first Desert Code Camp ( http://desertcodecamp.com/ ) and it was fantastic!  It is great that there is so much tech going on.  There was such a wide variety of classes that were put on.  I was so impressed with the whole event.  From breakfast to dinner they took care of everything and it didn't cost anything to go to it.

I got to see a great presentation on Ruby on Rails 101 put on by Clayton Lengel-Zigich that taught me more than all of the tutorials that I have done.  I also sat in on his HTML5 class ( all of his presentations are at http://bit.ly/i4lozg ) that was equally informative.  I am not going to rush out and code everything in HTML5 just yet as our friends at Microsoft do NOT have a browser to support it yet (IE5 supports SOME of HTML5) but it is amazing what HTML5 can do.  I just created a form for my companies website using jQuery so that I can require and validate fields and a lot of this is already in HTML5.  Not to say that jQuery isn't great but why re-build the wheel?

I also sat in on a CoffeeScript class that was very impressive.  I once looked at javascript and thought it to be too difficult and for that matter a very messy language.  CoffeeScript allows you to write in a clear cut sensible way and then create the .js for you.  Hmm, I may have to look at JavaScript a little more.

Speaking of JavaScript, I also sat in on a Node.js class which is a is a server-side JavaScript environment.  What was insanely incredible was Nodester ( http://nodester.com/ ) which is a FREE Heroku like hosting for Node.js that was created by a friend on mine Chris Matthieu ( @chrismatthieu ).  In addition to this Chris also created a JavaScript based way to place calls within a browser without using a VOIP account or Skype.  If you really want to be amazed check out http://phono.com/ !!

How much did I love Desert Code Camp?  Enough that I volunteered to help with the next one!