Winnipeg Codecamp for 2011 has come and gone. SkullSpace, with its own track, stickers, and a pile of free giveaways, managed to fill the 40-person room to capacity (and more!) all day. A number of members came out to support us, plus a bunch of people we don't know. We didn't see any other talks that day, but I think it's safe to assume that ours were the best!
Before I go on, a big thank you goes out to D'Arcy Lussier, Red River College, all the sponsors, and anybody else who helped make this happen!
The day started on a high note with Stef speaking on jQuery. Despite it being 9am on a Saturday morning, people were bringing in chairs from the other room. He gave a great overview of jQuery, complete with demos that included a jQuery-like library based on a story about the Unicode Snowman ("☃"). Download slides
Introduction to jQuery from SkullSpace Winnipeg on Vimeo.
Next up was Mak's talk on the Nmap Security Scanner project. This talk did a brief overview of the Nmap project and the many different things it does (including the "arcane" OS-detection algorithms). Primarily, though, he covered covered the Nmap Scripting Engine, with discussions on how to write scripts for a variety of uses. Download slides
Introduction to the Nmap Security Scanner from SkullSpace Winnipeg on Vimeo.
Lunch came next. Free food, as it turns out, was everybody's favourite part of the day.
After lunch, Ron (that's me!) spoke on stupid mistakes made by smart people. The talk covered a wide varitety of issues he's seen in the field, including protocol mistakes, bad crypto, poor use of randomization, and more. There were several demos, all of which, by some miracle, worked on the first try. Download slides
Stupid Mistakes Made By Smart People from SkullSpace Winnipeg on Vimeo.
Next, Andrew impressed everybody with a talk on the spread of hackerspaces throughout Europe and North America. He concluded with an extended Q&A and discussion about SkullSpace. The audience had a lot of really great questions! Download slides
Hackerspace Everywhere! Winnipeg: our time is now from SkullSpace Winnipeg on Vimeo.
And finally, Dan (who has a level 7 beard!) finished the day with a talk on theming Wordpress. After a bumpy start that he handled spectacularly, he walked the audience through developing a portfolio site featuring a picture of his un-bearded self. Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures of his talk (if you do have any, please share!).
We wrapped up the night by heading to the King's Head. After the other Code Camp folks went home, we joined up with a Reddit meetup and had a long, fun night! It's safe to say that everybody's favourite part was Andrew trying to find more Reddit people - everybody who came through the door was asked if they're from the Internet. Few were.
As a special treat to Codecamp guests (and you, now!) we had a special "secret challenge" that we hosted. The challenge, which is still playable, has been a rousing success with over two hundred players (two of whom have completed the challenge as a team and two of whom completed it themselves)!
