A few months ago I was chatting with some of my Microsoft MVP friends about rebooting the Code Camp event we ran in the 2010’s. The idea was to create an event where speakers with different backgrounds, experience and areas of interest could present and where our audience to learn things that might not be in their go to topic areas.

Our friends at the Ara Institute of Canterbury kindly provided us with a space for this community event, allowing us to make it free for anyone to attend. It was great to not only see students attending, but also presenting sessions! Their work was impressive!

Here are a few photos from the day, filled with conversations, learning and shared experiences.

Events like this don’t happen without fabulous speakers, who take time out of their weekend to present. Thank you to these amazing people:

• Bevan Arps – Becoming a better developer
• Dorje McKinnon – You, ethics, software and work
• Emma Humphrey – AI Myth Busting: A practical guide for beginners
• Hamish Watson – DevOps and FinOps
• Bryn Lewis – .NET on tiny devices
• Chris Saunders – The journey of AI Assisted Coding~ From First Draft in Svelte to Final App in Rust—All in 32 Hours.
• Clarence De Jesus – Building a Literacy Tutor Agentic AI from Scratch
• Jeff Komen – Effective Data Visualisation with PowerBI
• Jeremy Lawson – Basics and Watchouts of Agile and Product Management
• Blake Burgess – Problem solving quickly after 50,000 hours
• Michael Rea – My Journey with AI: From Curiosity to Eureka
• Sudeep Ghatak – Multi Agent systems with Copilot Studio
• Warwick Rudd – Accidental Azure DBA in 2025 Copilot is your Toolkit
• Yerren van Sint Annaland – Should you really just build the thing?
• Daniel Marsh-Patrick – Introduction to Dynamic SVG in PowerBI
• Steve Knutson – Skills development, resources and community

There were many highlights, but one that stood out to me was when one of our first time presenters had some technology challenges. People rallied around to help them and in what can be a stressful moment. Helping each other in a moment of need is an important community value.

Another first time speaker, Clarence De Jesus, did a great presentation on his project to create a Literacy Tutor using AI. English was his second language and he explained why tools like this help people. The impressive part the use of AI to build a coach, rather than generate a result.

During the keynote I put out the challenge to everyone to join local user groups and get involved!

There were a lot of though provoking conversations about AI, the good, the bad and the awful! We lifted ourselves up from the technology to learn more about the issue and to discuss ways to mitigating them. Start with awareness! Learn more at the Christchurch AI Risk and Ethics Community.

I noticed a few times where the audience didn’t have enough background to understand some of the technical talk. Sudeep Ghatak and I took this as an opportunity to give a Power Platform crash course to an audience that had never seen it before. Later Warwick Rudd shared is immense knowledge with people who were very new to the subject of DBA’s, Azure SQL and Fabric. The ability for experienced speakers to pivot to meet the audience at their level, takes great skill and is awesome to see in action!

We ended the day talking about career advancement and learning. There were a lot of good takeaways from the audience discussion including the importance of being able to articulate the problem you are solving, forming study groups for certification goals, what it is like to be neuro-diverse in a workplace and how conversations with the boss can help.

It is humbling to get so many nice comments from people after the event. I appreciate that very much and it helps answer the question, “why did you organise this?”.

Thank you all!