Next Gen Developer

I was reading Simon Middlemiss' blog post on his experience of the developer day talks, and it made me smile.  In short he found that the three talks by the only three female speakers stood out to him better than the other 2 by the guys.  I am just wondering whether the girls are beginning to get better at tech talk or whether they are finally getting the recognition they deserve!  Either way it's all good!

On my side I am slowly getting to feel more comfortable talking on technical subjects, but I only ever choose areas that I have had experience of to talk in depth on.  I guess that is my own personal comfort zone.  I never used to feel comfortable doing public speaking but over the years have tried to get better at it.  I am hoping that it has paid off.  It was great to hear that Simon enjoyed the sessions and that I didn't look like a total ameteur with a lack of wifi. (grrrr... There was no way I was letting it put me off of getting my message across ;) )

I hope Helen and Joanna feel proud of standing out from their male counterparts!  You are both great and I'm glad that I wasn't the only female presenter this time round!  I hope that it sets a precident for more of the female developers to come forward and present sessions.  It's not as scary as people seem to think.  The audiences there are friendly and even when everything goes wrong with internet access they are patient and welcome new ideas, concepts and are willing to learn!

Well I was at DDD4 and it was a fun day!  There was a little last minute preperation the night before, just polishing off the slides and placing all the links in them.  It's just a shame that the Microsoft internet let me down.  I ended up talking for an entire hour about web 2.0 technologies for business rather than being able to show the full power of what you can do with them.  All the same I think it went well under the circumstances, and I don't think I totally fluffed it.  At least the feedback hasn't been too harsh so far. 

There was also a channel 9 video done (and will be online eventually...) and Barry and I nicked their video camera at the end of it as well... we even managed to download the video file off of it and Barry will upload it online as soon as he has a chance.  I think you may find it quite funny...

Other things that happened at the event... The TechEd session was amusing and the Next Generation User Group guys were great fun (as always!) , they just have this way about them.  They said that their session was none technical, but yet they still managed to get the tech interviews into their session from some of the key players at TechEd.  I was very impressed, they had obviously spent a bit of time putting it all together and they did well to collect all the swag from the stands.  I'm still wondering how on earth they managed to pry one of the organisers fleeces away from one of the ladies.  I think they must have used their charm to distract some poor lady! (Those cheeky boys!)

I heard a LOT of good things about the Ruby on Rails session done by Dave Verwer which I was sorry to miss. (because I was trying to sort out the internet connections for my session.... to no success!)  I will definately be downloading those slides. 

I will be doing a webcast recording of my session as it was going to be originally and that will be sent to the organisers of DDD4 to put online.  I hope that the demo and slides will be of use to people and that everyone learnt a little something form the session. 

As much as I like and respect Ed Gibson, I do wonder what he was thinking hi-jacking the break and over-running into the session after it.  I don't much mind that he chose to share his knowledge in that way and he did have a captive audience but next time Ed consider this, maybe just put together a videocast of the talk for the world to hear instead.  I know quite a few people at the session have heard about your FBI based experiences with security before so how about a few new real world examples from more recent years?  I'm sure you can think of a few. (Oh and btw... aren't you a Microsoftie... and by all accounts shouldn't you be banned from talking at the event?  I thought that the rules were community developers only... "There will be NO Microsoft speakers presenting" as quoted on the DDD website!  Could someone confirm this?)

Anyway, all in all the organisers from the event did really well and were only really let down by the lack of internet access on Microsoft's part, which could quite easily be resolved by a guest wireless account or a relible wired network.  If the likes of Yahoo can manage to get solid wired access for Barcamp London then I'm sure Microsoft can get their hardware sorted out so that we can pass through their network without it being a security risk either.  I hope that Microsoft will take a serious look into this for next time, especially when web 2.0 technologies and the latest softwares all interlink with the net one way or another. PLEASE sort it out for us next time!!!!! Pretty Please!  It will open up the topic areas for talks no end and demo's can then be done far easier!  If I had known it would be that much of an issue I would have pre-recorded my demo as a screen cast!