As I write this, I realize I cannot recall exactly how many times I have attended CodeMash. Is it 11? 12? 13? I know I missed the first one and that I've attended every one since, so I'll call this one N-1.

This one was different than most. For years, I was a community speaker and I worked for companies that sponsored CodeMash (sometimes because I convinced them to do so). Then, I joined Microsoft as an Evangelist and large community events like this were part of my job.

Not this year. My role at Microsoft has changed and community is not a part of it. So I invited myself to CodeMash.

For the third year in a row, we invited Jon Skeet to speak at the Great Lakes Area .NET User Group - a group that I ran years ago - prior to CodeMash. So, I drove to Michigan and Ondrej and I picked up Jon from the airport after his flight from London, UK. He spoke that evening on Versioning 1.0.1, the same talk he planned to deliver at CodeMash. After the meeting, we drove a caravan from Southfield, MI to Sandusky, OH.

For me, it was a working week, so I only attended about a third of the conference, but I still got a lot out of it.

I saw a few sessions. Some good ones were
Deep Learning like a Viking - Building Convolutional Neural Networks with Keras, in which Guy Royse demonstrated how to build a machine learning model to recognize pictures of Viking runes.
Notebooks are still cool…with Jupyter, in which Ryan Bales introduced Jupyter Labs - the next evolution of Jupyter notebooks.
Code Checkup: Tools to check the health of your code, in which Doug Mair described a number of IDE plug-ins and stand-alone tools to analyze code quality.
Modern 2FA in ASP.NET Core, in which Ondrej Balas showed how to make your applications more secure with the latest 2-Factor Authentication tools and technology.

During dinner Thursday evening, Brian Prince gave an inspirational talk about how he became interested in programming and how he stood on the shoulders of giants. He concluded with the call to action: "Be someone else's shoulders". This session resonated with me because Brian has had a strong influence on my career as we worked together for years.

There were other activities, including Lightning Talks (most were by technologists, but not about technology); a kids' track, known as "KidzMash" that taught children about programming; a magic show; and a water park (I visited but did not immerse myself).

As always, I invested a significant amount of time in what some call the Conference Hallway Track, asking questions of technologists and learning what they are working on and the things that affect their work. I had several conversations about diversity in technology and what we can do to improve it.

This part of the country has a strong developer community and I have always been impressed with the willingness people have to share their ideas.

I enjoyed the conference and I look forward to attending next year for (N+1) - 1.