I usually spend my summers in Hood River, Oregon which is an hour east of Portland. I like to get away from Maui and ‘life on the rock’ for a bit every year to play in a different playground of river, forest and mountains, none of which we have much of on Maui.

I’ve been coming here almost every summer for a the 6 years I’ve lived on Maui, but in all these years I never managed to actually get out to any of the local user groups (well, once upon a time I ran the local FoxPro user group in Portland). I finally managed to go last week to the Portland .NET User Group last week where I found out about Portland Code Camp. Ah, the obvious things you miss when you’re not plugged into the local community.

Long story short, it’s time to make up for lost time. Things are happening in Portland and in a couple of weeks there will be a Portland Code Camp. There’ve been a number of Code Camps like this around the country, which are free events hosted by developers for developers to share technology in a community like event.

The content of Code Camp isn’t specific to .NET per se, but looking at the impressive roster of speakers that are showing up I’d say most of the content will be focused around .NET. Speakers include, Scott Hanselman  (one of my personal favorites), Ted Newart, Chris Sells, William Vaughn, Cathi Gero and many others I recognize, have read but don’t know <g>. Oh yeah, and I’m also doing a couple of sessions as well.

I’m really looking forward to this – it’ll be a low stress environment and I’ll finally have some time to actually go SEE some sessions, which rarely happens at conferences that I go to speak at.

This event is a fairly spontaneous effort with planning to implementation in about a month which will be impressive with this many contributors and speakers already, and the roster may not even be complete. It’s a free event and by the looks of it, it’ll have awesome content and a great community social aspect to it, so there’s no reason if you’re around this area to not go check it out…