In my previous post on Silicon Valley Code Camp, I mentioned that there were a lot of people making the rounds. And by “a lot,” I mean several thousand. That’s a lot of people to talk to (we try to talk to everyone), and at the end of two days of pressing the flesh in the Northern California sunshine, you can get a little…goofy. A little weird.

Since we had to pre-ship everything we intended to give away, we didn’t have any of our bulkier items available at the table. What we did have were giant stacks of brochures and notebooks, including a couple thousand of our popular “hello world” notebooks.

Near the end of day two we were down to about 100 notebooks, but the crowds were thinning out. We didn’t want to carry any of the notebooks back with us in our luggage, so we began to hype and promote them.

Since we were punch drunk, bedraggled and knackered by that point, our notebook promotion turned into a series of ridiculous sideshow barker-style pitches, shouted in the general direction of whoever passed by the table.

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WHAT YOU SEE BEFORE YOU ARE GENUINE GRAPH PAPER NOTEBOOKS. THEY’RE HERE, THEY’RE REAL, AND THEY’RE GUARANTEED!”

“YOU KNOW ‘EM, YOU LOVE ‘EM – NOTEBOOKS! VERY SPECIAL BOOKS FOR YOUR VERY SPECIAL THOUGHTS! THOUGHTS LIKE YOURS, SIR! YES, YOURS!”

“YOU’VE HEARD THE TALES OF THE GRAPH PAPER NOTEBOOKS! WELL, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN I’M HERE TO TELL YOU THAT THEY ARE QUITE REAL, AND CAN ACTUALLY BE YOURS AT ABSOLUTELY NO CHARGE TO YOURSELVES OR YOUR LOVED ONES!”

While we did get more than a few “What’s wrong with you?” looks, most people were amused and happily relieved us of the remaining notebooks. But we still had a stack of brochures to get rid of. A brochure isn’t exactly a utilitarian item like a notebook though, so they aren’t as easy to get into people’s hands.

That is, unless you add value to them. Which is exactly what Takeshi did when he began to insert the brochures into napkins, which we then hawked as “FREE NAPKINS!” to anyone walking by.

Most people didn’t have much need for a napkin, but they were intrigued, so slowly but surely, the napkin-wrapped brochures disappeared, until every brochure, napkin, notebook and shred of dignity that we arrived with were gone.

It was an act of exhausted desperation, hamminess and self-amusement, but somehow everything came together at that particular moment, and it worked.

I can’t guarantee that we’ll put on a show for you at the next code camp we attend, but stop by and say hello anyway, and maybe – just maybe – you’ll walk away with a GENUINE, FREE NAPKIN!
(or item of equal value, subject to availability and local regulations.)

We recently attended the Silicon Valley Code Camp, and it was quite a weekend.

First things first, if you’re unfamiliar with the concept, Code Camps are intensive one or two day code and development conferences, centered around various regional development communities. If you live in a big city (and a lot of smaller cities), chances are there’s a Code Camp taking place at least once a year somewhere near you.

Here in Southern California, for example, we have the SoCal Code Camps, a series of three Code Camps that take place in Los Angeles, Fullerton and San Diego every year.

But the mother of all Code Camps is the Silicon Valley Code Camp. Based on the attendance figures they publish and the number of people we saw and spoke to, I would say it is easily three times the size of the largest SoCal Code Camp.

We sponsor dozens of Code Camps around the country, but typically we only show our faces at the SoCal Code Camps. This year though we decided to make the trek up to the bay area and meet and greet, as they say. Our hope was to do a session as well (we have done them at SoCal Code Camps), but the timing of the event didn’t sync with what we wanted to present, so we simply observed and talked to as many people as we could.

We met a lot of current DiscountASP.NET customers, which is always great. Apparently it’s great for some of our users as well, as one of them commented, “Oh, it’s good to see it’s not just one guy.” Not sure how one guy could work all of this, but there you go. At least we proved him wrong. I just hope he doesn’t think it’s only a three guy operation since only three of us were there.

Since Silicon Valley Code Camp is so big, a lot of bigger companies show up as well. Microsoft had a Windows 8 muscle car parked nearby, complete with its own security guard. We posted a lot of pictures, so you can see what was going on.

It might seem easy, standing behind a table and talking to people all day, and I suppose in the scheme of things, it is easy. Especially when you’re talking about something you love. And in the grand scheme of things, it beats digging a ditch, as my grandfather used to say.

But it is exhausting (if you do it right), I’m not going to lie. Near the end of the second day we started to get a little loopy. I’ll tell you about that in part two…