Utah Code Camp is run by the local community. As organizers, we try our best to select sessions that you want to see. That’s why we ask you to vote for your favorite sessions. But we apply other criteria when selecting topics.

First, we order the session list by votes. Top vote getters are given priority and generally assigned to the biggest rooms.

Next, we eliminate speakers that have multiple sessions. This allows us to have a variety of speakers. But it could also mean that a great speaker is replaced by one without great speaking skills. More on that in a moment.

We then make sure out-of-town speakers and sponsors that didn’t make the above cut are worked in. The sponsors pay money to have a booth at Code Camp. As part of that, we give them a session, but ask that it not be an advertisement for their products.

Now comes the hard part…working out the session grid. We don’t want to put multiple sessions on a similar topic at the same time if we can help it. This means that if you want to concentrate on a single topic, for example, mobile development, you can get to all those sessions. This is by far, the hardest part of session scheduling.

Once this is done, we email all the people who submitted and let them know if they are in or out. Yeah, it’s kinda like Project Runway. This year we had over 70 sessions submitted. We simply don’t have the room to hold that many sessions, so some presenters won’t be speaking. We then publish the schedule. It’s tweaked a couple of times before Code Camp as people tell us they have to speak in the morning or afternoon.

You then show up the day of the event to hear all the fine speakers, network with your peers, and be schmoozed by great sponsors.

Now, we know that some people are better presenters than others. Also, we sometimes have first time presenters. We encourage this. To help out, we do a two hour speaker training event a couple of weeks before Code Camp. People who are experienced at giving technical presentations freely give advice to those starting out. Even veteran speakers have learned things from the training.

In all, we work hard to give you the sessions you vote for and to make the event worth your time. We hope it is. Please let us know in the eval or by email after the event how we did.