As you saw in the previous post, this weekend I travelled (twice!) to Wagga with Andrew and Fordy from work to Code Camp Oz.

I had known from reading the agenda that this year's code camp was going to be something special - presentations from the likes of Paul Stovell, Joseph Cooney, Shane Morris and (visiting from Spain) Fernando Guerrero made it a must-see -  but I didn't realise just how much better it was going to be than previous camps.

You see, this year we started using hashtags to track everybody's twitter feeds, and there was maybe a dozen of us live-twittering the event. As each presenter ran through his talk, we were able to argue the finer points of the topic and share experiences. It absolutely changed the tone of the conference (can I call it a conference?) for me. Instead of being a mute member of the audience, I was a living, interactive part of every presentation.

On top of this, I got to meet in real life a bunch of people that I'd hitherto only known online. Paul Stovell, Craig Bailey, Angus McDonald, Warren "ManiacD" (whose surname I don't know), and (from across the room) Jodie Miners. I also picked up a few more twitter followers and followees, mostly people who were also at code camp but whom I didn't get to meet face-to-face.

Highlights? For me probably Paul's presentation on SyncLINQ and Joseph's on Silverlight vs WPF, but Phil Beadle's talk on test-driven development was probably the one that caused the most ripples across the twittersphere as people debated its pros and cons.