I bring this up *not just* because it will be a great conference on a subject that is "the holy grail for many developers" - Telecommuting, but also because it will again have 2 of our members in the 5 speaker lineup - Ligaya Turmelle and Lorna Jane Mitchell.

Ligaya will bespeaking on keeping the work and life balance intact despite working from home and Lorna offers a few suggestions for you to answer the question "Could You Telecommute?". The Day Camp 4 Developers even happens Saturday, March 5th and lasts all day. There's a few different ticket options ranging from just the event out to an "Office Party" for more than one attendee.

Those of you who know me know that telecommuting, remote working or distributed teams, whatever you want to call it, is a passion of mine. I've written about it, spoke about it and most importantly, I live it. Now, I've put together 5 friends who are going to talk to you about it. They are going to cover everything from Is it right for you? to How to talk to your boss about telecommuting. If you are a developer working remote, come learn about tools and tips, if you want to be a remote worker, come figure out if it's right for you.

The cost for the day-long event is only $35 USD and includes talks from Lorna Mitchell, Ivo Jansch, Jack Ford, Ligaya Turmelle and Avadi Grimm on a range of topics related to telecommuting. For more information or to register and reserve your spot, head over to the Day Camp 4 Developers site and get signed up. There's a few different options to sign up for - the normal pass, a pass that includes a t-shirt, a "videos only" pass and the "office party" for groups that would like to all attend at once.

It sounds like such a simple thing; just put them up for download, right? Not really. Let's look at the actual requirements: Shopping cart to allow me to eventually sell the videos, a way to let my existing ticket holders "buy" them for free. (Coupon codes), a way to keep the real location of the files hidden so people don't just go download them. Those were the biggest items. Beyond that I was willing to either sacrifice or code it myself.

After searching around and trying out a few solutions, he decided on eShop ("it's good, not great) a WordPress plugin that lets you set up a quite configurable ecommerce website. It also includes some basic statistics features, uses the custom post types to configure products and lets customers sign into the site to handle their own options.

Well, it's done. Our first ever Day Camp 4 Developers was yesterday and was by most accounts, a rousing success. Some of the comments over at Joind.In are just wonderful. I won't rehash all the great times and comments but I do want to list a few things I learned, even if only for myself.

Some of the things he pulled from the sessions included:

• Don't write software, use the tools available
• Long breaks are bad
• People will forgive a LOT if the content is good
• Face-to-face still trumps cyberspace