The Artima Developer Community
Sponsored Link

Computing Thoughts
Videos of Recent Presentations
by Bruce Eckel
June 4, 2014
Summary
On April 24, I spoke at the Craft conference in Budapest. On May 7, I spoke at the SF Scala user group. Here are links to the videos, along with my Reinventing Business presentation from last Summer's OSCON.

Advertisement

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.

Talk Back!

Have an opinion? Be the first to post a comment about this weblog entry.

RSS Feed

If you'd like to be notified whenever Bruce Eckel adds a new entry to his weblog, subscribe to his RSS feed.

About the Blogger

Bruce Eckel (www.BruceEckel.com) provides development assistance in Python with user interfaces in Flex. He is the author of Thinking in Java (Prentice-Hall, 1998, 2nd Edition, 2000, 3rd Edition, 2003, 4th Edition, 2005), the Hands-On Java Seminar CD ROM (available on the Web site), Thinking in C++ (PH 1995; 2nd edition 2000, Volume 2 with Chuck Allison, 2003), C++ Inside & Out (Osborne/McGraw-Hill 1993), among others. He's given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences.

This weblog entry is Copyright © 2014 Bruce Eckel. All rights reserved.

Sponsored Links



Google
  Web Artima.com   

Copyright © 1996-2019 Artima, Inc. All Rights Reserved. - Privacy Policy - Terms of Use