I'm a bit late to this, but they've just started putting together the logistics for Seattle Code Camp (Oct 22-23), a community-driven event bringing programming speakers and interested attendees together for a couple of days, gratis. Who is "they", you ask? It's that Evil Empire, Microsoft, out to steal your souls. Be warned, Java faithful, lest ye lose your chance at the Afterlife and Good Code!

Not.

Code Camps are a recent invention of Microsoft's, and they're intended to be technology-agnostic. (In other words, no evangelism, no hard-sells to convert you to .NET. As a matter of fact, I think I've heard more anti-Microsoft jokes from the Microsoft Developer Evangelist team than any other organized body, including the JBoss folks.) Microsoft is doing what it can to improve it's relationship with developers on the whole, and this is one of those efforts. It's on the up-and-up, believe me--we had a number of non-.NET/non-Microsoft talks at the Portland Code Camp a few months ago, for example.

I'm the track chair of the Java technology area, for example, and already a friend of mine (whose name I'm not sure I have permission to mention here, so I'll play it safe and not say it, but you'd recognize it if you heard it--he's behind a couple of good XML open-source frameworks, on which he'll be speaking) has agreed to brave the waters and come speak. If you're interested in Java, Ruby, .NET, XML, or anything else code-related, come on by; details of where will be posted soon. If you're interested in speaking at said event--and this is not open to just professional speakers, but anyone with something interesting and code-related to show other programmers--contact me and I'll either put you in touch with the right folks, or (if it's Java-related), it's me you deal with.

And just for the record, I would LOVE it if the Seattle Java community stormed the show and outnumbered the .NET talks. Email me and let's make it happen.