What Happened At SoCal Code Camp And The Best Session I Attended!

Woohoo! That was a great Code Camp. Thanks to Woody and the gang for making this event happen. It was a fun and knowledge-filled event. I even got swags (a few books, a shirt, a small bag and a gym cup from Avanade). I saw a few Filipino devs in the event (Marlo, a .NET Developer from Long Beach and Marlon Ribunal) which was fun because I was used to being the only Filipino in the crowd (Yup, Woody can confirm that :P). I saw two other guys but I wasn't able to approach them (because i'm shy :P). Next time I'll take the chance to communicate with them and probably sway them to join DevPinoy. All in all there was 6 Filipino Devs in the event (that's me and my wife, marlo, marlon and the two other Filipino guys) that I was able to count.

Ok, time for best session in SoCal Code Camp award.

The best session that I attended was the session of Scott Hodson, president of Ubero called "Programmer to CEO: Starting your own software business". It talks about how you can start your own business, the processes that you need to go through to have one, the mindset that you should have when you are thinking of starting your own business, the people you need to communicate with in order to get the funds you need (VCs and Angel Investors) and the pain that you will go through while trying to make all the parts of your business move.

I was really impressed with the amount of knowledge that Scott provided to us in his talk and it opened my eyes on how I continue my dream of building a world-class Filipino owned outsourcing company. I do consulting on the side when I have the time and have outsourced projects to Manila in the past. I have people I trust with certain types of projects but never had the ability to consolidate this resources into one great enterprise. I know I could but I don't have the funds yet to start building this dream. Probably in a year or two I can make abigger push to make it happen but in the meantime I have decided on focusing on building applications that I can market to generate funds (which i need to revisit). I have a couple of ideas here and there but after listening to Scott I realized that I need to go back to the drawingboard and start analyzing my goals, resources and ideas. Man, what an eyeopener. His presentation should be available to download in a few days so don't forget to go and checkout the SoCal Code Camp site to get this presentation.

That was fun! The next one would be at UC San Diego this June and I'm going to be there again. I hope this time we can sway Jon Galloway, Ben Sheirman , Scott Koon and other great speakers to talk in San Diego.