Our own Alan Robbins gave a public presentation on Social Media Marketing to a packed house at last week’s First Friday event at TechTown in Detroit.

See Alan’s blog about the event and his PowerPoint slides at http://alanrobbins.blogspot.com.

For the third straight year we sponsored the CodeMash conference. The 2009 edition boasted a highest ever attendance with 540+ people representing all facets of technology.

Whatever you call yourself—software developer/coder/computer engineer/techie/geek—if you weigh the cost vs. benefit and can get yourself to Northern Ohio in January then CodeMash is a no-brainer.

CodeMash is dominated by hardcore technical presentations. If anything, it is a “so many sessions so little time” situation.

Our Senior Operations Manager Peg Bogema attended one session presented by Venkat Subramaniam titled Practices of an Agile Developer. Peg who is herself a certified Scrum Master, had this feedback: “I was pretty amazed that Venkat filled up the large room where his session was presented. I’m guessing that amounts to about 150 attendees. Venkat’s presentation was interesting, entertaining, relevant and full of examples. I came away with some good strategies for use in our agile development model.”

Brian Skory, our Technical Staffing Consultant, attended a “Soft Skills” presentation by Brian H. Prince, an Architect Evangelist with Microsoft and one of the co-founders of CodeMash . Our Brian had this to say: “Brian Prince’s presentation spoke to one of the non-technical aspects of the industry—soft skills.  He advised that you are your best promoter.  Every Monday morning, jot down your more notable accomplishments from the previous week;  use these to keep your resume updated and to fortify your performance reviews. Develop the art of listening twice as much as you talk and you’ll be amazed at how much you will learn from your colleagues and customers. Find a brainstorming methodology that you like (there are many free Web-based tools that can be found with a Google search) and use it on a regular basis for your project development.”

John W. Stout, founder and president of Stout Systems and Stout Tech Talent, presented his time-honored talk So You Want to be a Consultant? This session was updated to include material on prospering in the current business environment and the role of social media in marketing oneself.

Our thanks and appreciation go out to the many people involved in the planning, preparations and execution of CodeMash.

If you haven’t been to, or never heard of CodeMash, here’s the scoop: CodeMash is a software developer’s conference with sessions covering software architecture, desktop development, Web development, methodologies, mobility, languages and more. The upcoming event spans 3 days in January from the 7th to the 9th.

On the 8th and 9th there will be more than 45 sessions consisting of the above topics.

An optional “PreCompiler” event will be held on the 7th that consists of hands-on development workshops with full day tutorials on Ruby, Java, and .NET. There are also half-day workshops on Kanban, test driven development, and iPhone app development.

Stout Systems has sponsored this conference since its inception three years ago and is a proud Platinum Sponsor for 2009.

By the way, the venue for CodeMash is the Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, OH which boasts the largest indoor water park in the state. How can you beat waterslides, coding, wave pools, refactoring, raft rides, testing, surfing and swag in the dead of winter?