The Craft Conference exceeded my hopes and was a great experience (followed by a trip to Istanbul).

My presentation at Craft was titled "What Makes a Good Development Process?" and it reviewed the issues around development that have evolved over the last 15 years, without pitching specific approaches like Scrum/XP/etc. My intent was to describe the elements you need to pay attention to in establishing your development process (for example, if you don't have a repository, automation, and testing, you need to get those in place before you put in any more detailed processes).

Here is the link to the video.

Although the Craft presentation went well and I had a number of folks who expressed appreciation afterwards, it didn't quite feel right, because I was trying to create something for the conference rather than express something about me. As a result I didn't feel fully engaged with my presentation.

Fortunately, my friend James Ward had mentioned to Alexy Khrabrov, head of the San Francisco Scala User Group, that I would be in San Francisco after the Budapest/Istanbul trip, and he asked me to present to the group. I created a new presentation titled "Do Languages Matter?" which began by explaining my research into "Start With Why" and then chronicled my experience with languages over the years, eventually explaining why I've come to realize that promoting new languages doesn't have the impact/leverage that it once did (and while I haven't completely figured out my "why" yet, impact and leverage seem to be an important aspect of it). Short version: we used to have to make extensive and complex arguments for adopting a new language because it was a big deal to try one out. Now people just try them out, and decide based on the resulting experience.

The resulting presentation (here's the Meetup announcement) had a marvelous turnout (I stayed with Bill Venners and he also came), and I felt far more connected with both the material and the audience, as I hope you'll see in the video. At one point I said it was the presentation I should have given at the Craft Conference, and it seems likely that I will in fact give it there next year.

In the same time period, my Reinventing Business Presentation video from last Summer's OSCON was released. They used high-end equipment and the resulting video has very nice production values. I also feel like I was very "on" for the presentation so I was quite pleased with it. I gave another version of this presentation (which is, by its nature, always evolving) to a user group in Budapest right before the Craft conference, which also had a very nice turnout.

When I travel for conferences or consulting I try to do as many "side events" as possible, speaking at user groups, bookstores and even within companies (usually I'm visiting the company for some reason). If you know I'll be in your area and you are part of one of these, feel free to contact me.