Boise Code Camp 2024

I finally made it to BoiseCodeCamp 2024 — and even got to speak this time.

BoiseCodeCamp is hosted by the Boise Software Developers Group on the BoiseCodeWorks campus. About 100 people showed up this year, which made it feel more like a community gathering than a conference. That's honestly what I like about it.

Talks I attended

Scott Nichols gave the keynote on AI — specifically the current state of tools like GitHub Copilot and the LLMs powering them. His core argument was that AI won't replace engineers, but engineers who use AI will outpace those who don't. Hard to disagree with that.

Tsun Mok walked through OpenSCAD, an open source 3D modeling tool driven by code rather than a GUI. As someone who has never touched 3D modeling, it was surprisingly approachable — if you can write code, you can probably pick this up.

Gregg Irwin talked about Domain-Specific Languages: small, narrowly scoped languages built for a specific purpose, like SQL or RegEx. He demos his own language, Red, which was fun to see in action.

Speaking

I've been to BoiseCodeCamp since 2017, back when I was still deciding whether to switch into software development and understood maybe half of what anyone was saying. I told myself then that once I knew enough about something to talk about it, I'd submit a talk. This year I finally did.

I gave an intro talk on web accessibility — the basics, and what developers actually need to think about when building for it. There's a GitHub repo with my notes and demo here if you want to dig in.

Prepping the talk pushed me to go deeper on accessibility than I would have otherwise, which was worth it on its own. The speaker meet-and-greet the night before was a nice bonus — good excuse to meet the other speakers before the chaos of the day.

I'm already putting together a list of topics and conferences to submit to next year. More speaking incoming.