I saw a lot of great sessions, but I focused mostly on a couple of topics. I really enjoyed the sessions on algorithms, parallel programming, and Netflix’s use of AWS. I attended an evangelical (in a good way) session by @jonkruger on Ruby on Rails from a .NET developer’s perspective. I also worked through a bunch of Ruby Koans during the PreCompiler. This is the year I’m going to build some Ruby on Rails projects.

Another favorite session was Functional Programming for Everyday .NET Development by @jeremydmiller. I met him the previous CodeMash in an Open Spaces session on FubuMVC. This year, his presentation on applying functional programming techniques to everyday C# programming was among the most informative and useful for my day job.

An early session on the first day, Asymptotics and Algorithms, by @garyshort was a lot of fun. I dredged up old CS undergrad knowledge as he walked through Big-O notation and measuring some sort algorithms. In fact, his presentation was better than the one I remember receiving in school.

Of course, the @chadfowler keynote was interesting. I never thought a talk that uses examples from Six Sigma management strategy for 1/3 of the material would be so entertaining.

The other keynote I loved was by Scott Chacon (@chacon) of GitHub on what he called the “Developer Driven Development” philosophy of GitHub and why it works. It was an inspiring talk with the core being that the three things that motivate creative work are autonomy, mastery, and purpose and the Open Source way of doing development with decentralized, autonomous developers who can choose when, where, and what to work on is a great model for emphasizing those motivators. It works for GitHub and it an work for you.

I may have more detailed write-ups later, but I wanted to get some initial wrap-up thoughts down while they were still fresh in my mind. I highly recommend this conference. This was my fifth year attending and next year will hopefully be my sixth.

Once again, I will be attending CodeMash. I’ll blog about anything I find particularly exciting or interesting. It should be fun. Look me up if you are attending.

Weak opinions lead nowhere. The holder is unmotivated to develop strong supporting arguments and therefore the soundness of such opinions are suspect. You can’t learn much from someone with such opinions. I find people who hold very many weak opinions to be rather apathetic and irritating. I actually don’t encounter too many of these types of people. Maybe I am just lucky?

However, strong opinions that are held dogmatically are just about as useless as weak opinions. Such opinions have ossified and are immune to reason or counter-evidence. People holding very many such opinions can be merely annoying or occasionally very destructive if they have power to implement their views and their views turn out to be wrong. I regularly encounter people holding such opinions. These types of people are epitomized by the guests and hosts of the Sunday morning talk shows.

Strong opinions that are weakly held are what should be sought. They inspire one to develop strong arguments that are open to modification or even falsification as new evidence dictates. In order to develop and continusouly test such opinions, one needs to be well informed about the subject matter, as well as know how to properly interpret and reason about relevant data.

Continuously testing your opinions is hard work and it must be done with discipline, everyday, if one is to avoid slipping into dogmatism. Unfortunately, I don’t think our educational system does a good job of teaching people how to do this or how to even recognize the difference between a well supported opinion and a superficial one. That’s why, to this day, I consider Pete Amato’s Critical Reasoning course to be the most important course of my undergraduate college career and one that I always implore new students to take seriously.

Striving for strong opinions, weakly held will make you a better thinker. Question everything, seek empirical evidence to resolve disputes, and be your own harshest critic. Once the principle is internalized, you begin to see the world differently and it can be a revelatory experience. Of course, that’s just my opinion.