Posted by Peter Kellner on October 13, 2011 @ 5:22 PM
Now, in addition to being able to use PBWiki for pointing your session to slides and code, you can enter a URL into the session itself and that link will be active directly from your session. that is, if you press the “Edit” button your session from the Sessions page, you will see a new option to put your URL in (as below).
If you put something in these field, that link will be the redirect target when anyone clicks on the “Slides and Code” link on your session. That is, instead of saying “wiki here”, it will now say “Slides and Code” as a hyperlink. The trigger is anything entered in that field.
For those observant folks, the “Queue Email Notification” is a work in progress. Feel free to check it, but that feature is not yet completed so it may be queued for a while.
Posted by David Spark on October 6, 2011 @ 12:37 PM
You remember when the TV show “Friends” negotiated their contract as a group? No one star was trying to negotiate their contract separately. They realized that since the show didn’t have a single star, no single one of them had any leverage. Individually they were significant players. As a group they were a star. If they wanted a higher salary they’d have to negotiate as a group.
Similarly, you could do the same for a job in tech. At the Future of Web Apps conference in Las Vegas, I chatted with Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo about his recommendation on how to hack the tech hiring process. He suggested that you get a small collective of your developer friends and build web apps for six months and show them to Facebook, Yahoo, and Google. While a risky venture, he predicts in the talent starved market of Silicon Valley, you could actually sell your team for $1 million a developer.
In a sense, this is what incubators such as Y Combinator and TechStars are doing, said Calacanis. These start up camps are grooming talent. In response, angel investors and acquisition people are looking and pouncing. Calacanis predicts we’re going to see hundreds of sub-$50 million deals being made from the top dozen players.
Calacanis is also looking for A+ talent, but he knows he can’t compete in salary dollars with Silicon Valley’s 500-pound gorillas – Google, Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, and Yahoo. Instead, Calacanis uses his social media footprint to try to hire. He asks new talent for 3-4 years of their time (he usually gets 2). He says that beyond a salary they’ll learn from the Jedi master on how to begin a start up. If they leave, he may angel invest in their company, which he says is happening, or be on their board of advisors.
Dice Photo Contest – Win a Droid Bionic
At Silicon Valley Code Camp, Dice will be giving away a Droid Bionic. For a chance to win, pick up your fuzzy dice at the Dice table and tweet a picture with you and the dice or just the dice using the hashtags #gotdice and #SVCC. Term and conditions are here.
Posted by Peter Kellner on October 5, 2011 @ 11:20 PM
Having heard the news today of Steve Jobs passing, I feel the need to pause the frenzy and last minute tasks getting ready for Code Camp just 3 short days from now. Steve affected us all here in Silicon Valley in such a profound way, shaping not only our products, but instilling in so many of us the passion to reach higher than the top. Though my personal preference was never for his products, I’ll always remember Steve as someone who accomplished the difficult remarkably quickly, and the impossible in just a little bit longer.
Sunday morning, at 9:15AM Lino Tadros, my good friend and faithful historian of Silicon Valley history, has generously offered to retrace the steps of Apple in light of Steve Job’s passing today. Though other chores seem to always get in my way of attending the awesome speakers’ sessions at Code Camp, I intend to sit in on this one. We will be in Room 1500 which is also known as Appreciation hall. I know a lot of people will be planning on attending and as it only holds about 200 people, make sure you get there early to get a seat. Our code camp home page will continue to run in quiet respect for Steve through tomorrow morning as we all reflect on his life.
That’s it for now. Tomorrow afternoon we will be assigning class rooms based on everyone’s choices of sessions they plan to attend. If you have not done that yet, please come back to the site and pick. It is a big help for us. Expect in your email tomorrow night details of all the sessions, PDFs you can print with the schedule as well as all the other information you’ll need to attend Code Camp.
Posted by David Spark on August 17, 2011 @ 12:59 PM
Last night, Tuesday, August 16th, we had our first volunteer meeting. It was a great chance to talk to 50 or so people about our upcoming code camp. We went over all the volunteer jobs that are available both before and after the event, as well as had a good general Q&A session about code camp in general
One thing that came up was when can people sign up for the jobs at code camp. The answer is about 2 weeks before the event. What we will do is send out a mailing, post on this blog, twitter and facebook that signing up for volunteer jobs is now open. That means, you can come to our site and choose which job(s) and when you want to volunteer. Spots are on a first come first pick basis so if you want a particular job, you need to run (not walk) to the site and pick your favorite job. Whether that is Registration help or Lunch cleanup, they all fill up pretty quickly so make it a fast dash.
Finally, I just want to mentiont he benefits of volunteering
Satisfaction in helping make this free attendee event the best it can be
Meet lots of interseting people
Admission to BBQ Saturday night including Vegetarian meals as well as Andy’s BBQ
To get an idea of what jobs are available, take a look at this screen shot of what you will see when coming to the site (once we open up volunteering). This just shows Saturday, but there are Sunday job also to help with.
Posted by David Spark on October 13, 2010 @ 10:30 AM
Athol Foden and his son, Ben Foden, run the naming company Brighter Naming. At Silicon Valley Code Camp, I spoke with both of them about how developers need to understand the full process of productizing their code, turning into a business, and then being very conscious and deliberate with how they name it.
Athol Foden has a long history in being a coder and now he runs a naming company. In fact, he led the team to name the Symbian mobile operating system. Ben also offers some valuable tips about the importance of naming. Your product’s name is an actual thing that can have value in itself.
Posted by Peter Kellner on October 10, 2010 @ 7:31 AM
The California weather gods again delivered an awesome late summer day up on code camp. With all but one year of the past 5 doing this event having perfect weather, we are truly blessed. First and most important, we want to thank all our awesome volunteers (both speakers, staff and everyone who signed up to help) for doing whatever was necessary all day. Several times during the morning chaos of registration (thousands of people through a small area in a short time), I’d stop by registration and ask how it was going. Over and over I was told: This is hard, but we are doing it! Thanks!!!
Each year, there are always several small stories that I’m part of that I like to share. The one I’d like to share started at 8AM Saturday. Dave Nielsen (as always) brought the coffee (17 Erns from Peet’s I’d guess). We needed some volunteers to help carry the coffee from car to registration. Normally, when there is lots of heavy lifting like this, code camp is not the best place to find manual labor that is willing to carry heavy, large erns of coffee back and forth. This time though, we had an army of help. Chief Thomas Millar was here to do a presentation on Computer Forensics, and at least 10 of his army buddies were also here in full uniform. I asked a couple of them if they could help with the coffee and all I can say is I asked the right guys. Not only did they deliver them all in about 3 minutes flat, I saw one with the coffee on top of his shoulder. I can’t figure out how he got it up so high!
That’s it for now, Day 1 is over, only a couple hickups that we know of but in general a 100% success thanks to everyone, day 2 is about to begin.
Posted by Peter Kellner on September 27, 2010 @ 7:03 PM
If you’ve been to the Sessions listings either on the primary sessions page, or the sessions overview page, you’ll have noticed several new ways to search. On the Sessions page, you can now choose between days (Saturday or Sunday), and in those days, you can pick which timeslot you want to look at. Saturday has 5 time slots, and Sunday has 4 timeslots. The menu is just above the top session and looks like what I have below.
