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by James Britt.
Original Post: MWRC 2009 after-thoughts
Feed Title: James Britt: Ruby Development
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Feed Description: James Britt: Playing with better toys
Big thanks to Yehuda Katz for taking the time to explain the changed planed for Rails 3. (I copped to not fully paying attention to his talk because I was still hacking on my own presentation.) Things look really interesting.
A lengthy dinner with Jim Wierich, David Brady, and Matthew Nielsen. Aside from the top-notch geekery, there was much laughter watching oddball videos and discussion favorite TV shows. I also learned that goofy off-the-cuff remarks can find their way on Twitter very quickly. :) Monster props to Dana Gray for picking up our tab, too.
Dinner with Brain Marick and associates the night before was a treat as well. I mean that in multiple ways, as Kay Johansen grabbed the check that night. Be sure to watch Brian’s lightning talk on Micro-scale Retro-futurist Anarcho-syndicalism when the video comes around.
The talks were amazing. The shorter format made for punchier content, with more topics covered. Mike Moore and Pat Eyler did a great job of keeping things running and on time.
Remi Taylor did a remarkable lightning talk on rackbox After losing time due to video hookup issues, he still managed to blaze though without complete composure. True lightning. The crowd was quite impressed.
I more or less made a point of not hanging with folks from Phoenix. Nothing personal, but conferences such as these are the among the few chances to meet new people or to hang with folks I’ve only interacted with on-line.
I need to re-think my presentation style. Many people whose opinion I respect had good things to say, and I had a nice chat with James Edward Gray II about ways to fix some issues in my code. Still, I felt I was too stiff, and the talk lacked a clear focus. I’m thinking I need to drop the slides and do more live coding with more demonstration apps.
There was a discussion on the back channel about talks and slides, and a few people (including me) seemed to think that having no slides at all would be a good thing. Dave Brady, for example, was too sick to give his talk at the schedule time, but he came to the conference the next day and gave his talk right at the start of the lunch break. Without having brought his slides, he demoed his code and used Emacs to show a few text notes to reinforce his words. It was great.
It would be nice to have a conference along those lines. 20-30 minute talks, with no slides. Use your editor to display text if needed, but focus on what is said and code being run. Might need a catchy name. RawCamp. RawConf. LiveConf. SomethingSomething. Or something like that.
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