Developers of all languages to gather at Codemania

Organisers hope to gather different disciplines to "talk about good code"

Developers in Auckland will have a new technology conference to look forward to this year, and its organisers hope to offer something unique to the Auckland IT scene.

Codemania, which will be held on March 30 in the Auckland CBD, is a technology agnostic conference designed to bring together developers of different disciplines and programming langauges to “talk about good code”.

Speakers for the event include Sam Saffron from Stack Overflow, Damian Edwards, program manager on the ASP .NET team at Microsoft, and Karl von Randow, developer of the top selling Camera+ app for the iPhone.

Organisers Ben Gracewood and Ian Randall have previous experience organising coding conferences, having been part of the Datacom team which helped run Microsoft Communities’ Codecamp in previous years.

Gracewood, who is now a solutions architect at Intergen, says he saw a need for this kind of conference while working with Codecamp.

“We had a lot of interest from people outside of the company to come along with us, a lot of them not Microsoft developers but just wanting to talk with other developers about good code,” says Gracewood.

“There really isn’t a conference of this kind in Auckland,” he adds.

“In Wellington you have Webstock, and some others. The closest thing to it in Auckland is Tech Ed, where the developer education streams are always packed. People would say to me that they would love more opportunities to learn about coding in a similar way.”

Randall, who is a programmer at Datacom, says the conference will provide an opportunity for discussion on coding best practices and will include clinics for the more indepth questions.

“Of course you could always go online and get questions answered, but this provides an opportunity for some face to face problem solving,” says Randall.

The organisers says the name of the conference plays on the percieved animosity between developers of frameworks.

"It's a lot like professional wresting, these guys pretend to be enemies but really deep down they're working together for a greater show," says Gracewood.