With our latest release of the Silicon Valley Code Camp web site, sponsors can now maintain the information associated with their sponsorship.  For example, at the end of each code camp, we send an email to all our attendees letting them know how much we appreciate the sponsors covering all the expenses of the event.  In this email, we include a short (up to 140 characters) message from each sponsor.  Rather than trying to collect these emails one at a time, we ask each sponsor to go to a specific web page to fill in this information, then we combine them all into the email.

Nuts and Bolts of How Sponsors Fill in Their Information

Any sponsor who wants to update the sponsorship information inside of the code camp web site needs to have an account within the code camp site.  That means, the this particular person who will update the sponsor information must be registered with an email address that is associated with the sponsor.  You are probably thinking this is a chicken and egg problem.  How can you (the sponsor) add yourself to the list of people who are associated with the sponsor if you do not have an account to do it with.  The answer is we will set you up the first time, but you first have to register and tell us what your email you registered with so we can associate it with the sponsor record in our system.  Once that is done, when you go to the Registration Page and you will see a new hyperlink under the registration tab that you click on to modify the details.

When you click on this hyperlink, you will get the following page:

This shows you what we currently have (most likely all the top information will be blank and you need to update).  The emails at the bottom and user information we use so we can send special information to sponsors.  That is, NotReallyMe@adobe.com will receive information only intended for sponsors.  The two last columns determine whether or not these people will receive the information.  These email addresses to not need to be registered on the code camp site.  They will still get emails as the last two columns says.

Notice you can enter new people who you want to get special sponsor emails by typing there email address in the empty textfield, then pressing the “Insert” hyperlink.  You can also edit existing people you have associated with the sponsor by pressing the “Edit” link.  Just as an aside, if you delete there name here, it does not effect there registration to code camp, it just denies them access to this page and of course keeps them from getting special emails.

The next step is to press the “Edit” link.  The page looks as follows:

This is a very simple edit page that the sponsor updates as necessary.  Pressing the “Update” button is required to have this information stored.  When pressing the link “Sponsor Information Page”, this takes you back to the previous page where you can verify your data was input correctly.

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.

Any questions, feel free to comment below.

About 95% of our traffic is from California, no surprise.

And if you are curious where all those people are spending there time.  It seems the new Plan to Attend view is quite popular.

2247 Attended

209 Sessions

225 Volunteers

507 Large Pizzas

1269 Sandwiches

5000 Bottles of Water

5670 Snack Packs

18 Cambros of Coffee

1560 Parking Spaces

*Special Note:  BUILD notebook found!!!  If you had anything to do with it, please contact us or Stuart who is eternally grateful.

A Huge Thank you!

All through the day, countless people came up and thanked me for putting the event together.  First, let me say I really appreciate people saying that because it is a lot of work, but second and most important, I’m really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what takes to put on an event like this.  When you look around, you’ll see literally hundreds of people wearing code camp volunteer shirts, staff shirts and speaker shirts.  All those people our volunteers and together we make the event a success.   I feel blessed to be working with a group like this, and even a little guilty accepting the gratitude when I know so much of the credit goes beyond me.  So, to all you people who put in so much effort to make code camp a success, you have my heart felt thanks.

Below are some pictures.

Daniel, our Foothill College Staff Helper leaning on 1 of 2 palettes of cups from 10gen.  They always give away cups at shows so we could hardly so no.  The stats:  1100 Pounds, 1500 cups.  Big old truck.

I hope everyone likes water.   6000 bottles!  Our plan is to keep ice buckets in our sponsors tables and if attendees want water with their food, guess where they have to go.  I hope it’s not to burdonsome.  After all, the event is 100% and the goodies (including the water) are paid for by our generous sponsors.

Preparing the assembly of attendee bags.  We have 2000 attendee bags that will stuff with stuff from 11 Platinum sponsors.  30 seconds a bag, 8 volunteers at this task, you do the math.

Some accessories for our 500 Pizza’s and sandwiches.

@tammybaker123 guarding the DevExpress attendee bags.  90 or so per box, 25 boxes.

Alan and Peter guarding the door (from what I’m not sure)

Me!  Give me my camera back.  I have important work to do!

Drove the Prius in with one load. Did not run over any students.  No one seem to care.

Attendee Bag assembly line ready to go.

Shirt Factory.  Besides all the shirts vendors bring, we buy very nice collared embroidered shirts for our speakers and staff.  Volunteers get a very nice T-Shirt with a custom code camp design.

Well, I better get back (not that anyone misses me)

A map of both the campus and the classrooms is located here http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/Images/map-layout-update-2.jpg as well as on the back of your conference badge you pick up at registration. Also, please remember that the beltway around Foothill College is one-way so if you pass us, keep going around the circle and come back.

We will have printed copies of the schedule, but you can help us out by printing the following PDF files, which contain the session schedules for both Saturday & Sunday to bring with you.

http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/misc/siliconvalley-codecamp-2011-saturday.pdf

http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/misc/siliconvalley-codecamp-2011-sunday.pdf

http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/misc/siliconvalley-codecamp-2011-extras.pdf

(Track sessions and information can be found on the web at http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/Tracks.aspx)

All the same information is available on the full web site at http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com and is posted on our RSS feed at http://blog.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/. Please remember to provide feedback after each session by visiting the Sessions Page on the web site and choosing Session Evaluation on the lower right of each session description (see the 3rd pdf above ending in extras).

As guest of Foothill for the 6th year in a row, the college has asked us to be particularly careful of the following two things. 1) There is no eating or drinking in any of the classrooms and 2) In the class rooms that have computers, it is OK to use those computers to browse the internet but not to either disconnect the cables or install any software either from the web or USB. Thanks for everyone’s cooperation on this.

See you Very Soon!

Peter Kellner

Silicon Valley Code Camp Coordinator
http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com
http://peterkellner.net

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.

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.

Peter Kellner
Silicon Valley Code Camp Coordinator
http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com
http://peterkellner.net