Yesterday I attended New England Code Camp 14 (check out the #necc14 twitter stream while it lasts). I enjoyed many talks:

1. Maura Wilder on JavaScript Debugging (@squdgy)
2. Jason Haley on Comparing the Azure and Amazon Cloud Platforms (@haleyjason)
3. Jim O’Neil on Dissecting the Azure @Home Application (@jimoneil)
4. Abby Fichtner on Lean Startups (@hackerchick)
5. MC’d by Abby, various folks talking about their experiences at startups — 4 talks jam-packed into a fast-paced one-hour session:
   1. Vishal Kumar of savinz.com (“mint.com for shopping”)
   2. Allison Friedman (@rateitgreen) of Rate It Green (“yelp for the green building industry”)
   3. Sean Creely (@screeley) of Embedly (“make friendly embedded links”) – a Y Combinator company providing a service for turning tweets containing media links into something more user friendly (e.g., embed inline YouTube video rather than a link taking you to YouTube)
   4. Marc Held (@getzazu) of getzazu.com (“alarm clock 2.0”)

At Uno’s afterwards, I enjoyed chatting with many folks, including Veronica and Shawn Robichaud (all the way from Maine!), John from BUGC and Blue Fin, Slava Kokaev, entrepreneurs Marc, Billy, Brian, Vishal, and Dan Colon, dev evangelists Jim O’Neil and Chris Bowen, Yilmaz Rona from Trilogy, and of course Maura.

At the Code Camp, I presented twice on Azure-focused topics:

1. Cloud Computing 101: Azure Style! – an introduction to cloud computing, and an overview of the services that Microsoft’s cloud stack offers
2. Building Cloud-Native Applications with Azure – a mind-blowing tour of some of the changes that await the technology community as we move our world into the cloud

The Boston Azure User Group is one year old! You can follow the group on twitter @bostonazure. You can also follow me on twitter @codingoutloud. And I hope to see you at the next Boston Azure meeting on Thurs October 21 from 6:00-8:30 PM at NERD (registration and more info).