I’m on my way home from my first developer-fest: the Dev8D conference. I don’t have a background in software development, so this was a new experience for me, and I have to admit that I was massively impressed by the unadulterated enthusiasm on display.

The Software Sustainability Institute is mainly staffed by software developers, so it’s not like Dev8D was the first time I’ve engaged in a conversation that involved more abbreviations than actual words. However, this was the first time I’ve had to give a presentation to an undiluted audience of developers. That’s why I started with a slide stating CONFESSION: I felt the need to come out and declare myself as someone who does publicity. To my surprise, I wasn’t hounded out of the building.

Dev8D is a hands-on event. There are challenges to work on, training sessions with experts and some very cool applications. My favourite – definitely my favourite – was the Kinect hacking talk. Microsoft released the Kinect last year as one of the challengers to the Wii’s dominance of the interactive games market. Ben O'Steen talked about hacking the Kinect, getting your hands on the right libraries and then using it for whatever application you wished. And what better application than flying a model helicopter around the University of London student union by flapping your arms around?

It was a very useful event for the Software Sustainability Institute too. I got to plug the Collaborations Workshop, and publicised the expenses-paid version for developers - an offer that comes courtesy of the DevCSI project who run Dev8D. Steve Crouch and I unveiled AskSteve! A blog we’re running to answer software-development questions. One of the reasons for unveiling at Dev8D was to ask for some help. Hopefully this will lead to a few guest spots on the blog, which is one step towards turning AskSteve! into AskSteve and friends. We publicised the blog by unveiling a two-metre high poster showing a larger-than-actual-size Steve. Typical for a development event though, after unveiling the poster the first question I was asked was “how do you register a .ac.uk domain name?”.

The level of enthusiasm and interaction at Dev8D is very high. Everyone seems keen to work together and sort out problems, which must be the best indicator of a successful event. I’m look forward to next year, although I’m starting to feel the need to learn just a little bit of programming so that I can join in more properly. Maybe Dev8D will finally persuade me to get my coding hands dirty.