Tatham Oddie

Bugger it. Despite being ridiculously exhausted, I’m going to write this now because I can’t sleep. I’m also doing it in reverse order to finish up on a vaguely positive incline.

The Ugly

I got rightfully slammed in my presentation evals for ARC402. 44% of the audience were Very Dissatisfied. That placed me with the 6th worst scoring session at the conference.

The general trends were:

• I represented a knowledge of the subject (42% very satisfied – a positive here!)
• My presentation skills were satisfactory (47% satisfied – neutral)
• The information presented was bad (42% dissatisfied with usefulness)
• The presentation was ineffective (42% dissatisfied with effectiveness)

Armed with an array of comments to analyse, what did I do wrong? Thinking out loud, this is what I’ve come up with:

• I was put off by the noise from the neighbouring room and the mobile smackdown. I shouldn’t have been affected by this as much as I was.
• I rushed the content, when I was by no means under time pressure. I generally covered this content as a 20 minute segment at the end of a more holistic ASP.NET MVC presentation. While I had added additional content, and that is generally a rushed 20 minutes, I certainly shouldn’t have been rushing here.
• I lost the structure. I didn’t introduce myself (which people highlighted in the comments) and somehow I even forgot to ask for Q+A at the end, even though there’s a whole slide that prompts me to do just that.
• I focused my content too much on the blurb which came from Tech.Ed US instead of thinking myself about the wider architectural considerations. There’s a lot more too it than IoC and some attributes.
• Despite being crowned the Australian Annual IT Demonstration Champion this same week, my demo crashed and burned. Massive fail here.
• I’m still not good at dealing with non-developer audiences. This was something that also affected me at Web on the Piste, and is something I need to actively work on. As much as I am a fan of minimal slides + heaps of live code, if the people ask for high level content in an architecture track, it’s what you’ve got to give them.

Summarising:

I failed to identify the key differences between the demands of this session and those demands of previous talks I had done in this technology space. I was over confident in the content and thus failed to properly prepare and update my content for the latest release, the audience and the timing. I’d like to apologize to those who attended and expected more, the content owners who trusted me to be there and the community who supported me in getting there in the first place.

- Tatham Oddie, not-so-demo-champion

The Bad

I’m forever fighting with a balance between helping and helping too much. I was a key person on the Dev.Garten project this year, having done a significant amount of work pre-event including meeting with the client and developing infrastructure. Once the event actually started I began to realise the shear number of things I’d committed to doing throughout the week and that I was being stretched. While there were plenty of great people to keep the project moving, I could have done a better job of documenting the directions I had started and ensuring a smoother handover.

The Good

Despite this post starting on a decidedly (and deservedly) sour note, there were some amazing this that happened during the week.

My other session (TOT352) about Software+Services had a particularly small audience, however came out with 100% of the evals saying the demos were effective and 100% saying the technical content was just right. Ok, so the data is only working off 2 evaluations because there were only about 12 people in the room, but it’s better results than above either way.

I won the national final of the Demos Happen Here comp. Among other things, this means I’m off to Tech.Ed Los Angeles in 2009 and will shortly receive a shiny new Media Centre PC. When I made the original entry video it was an 8 minute demo, however by the national final I had it down to 4 mins 50 seconds which is a real testament to the quality of Windows Server 2008.

I built a Surface application. Amnesia own the only two Surface devices currently outside of the US and were kind enough to let me spend a day and a half playing on it before they took one to the event. It was my first time ever compiling a line of WPF or seeing the Surface SDK but in that 1.5 days I managed to get an application working which would pull session data out of CommNet and display it in response to a conference pass being placed on the table. The Surface team should be really proud of the quality of SDK that they have achieved to make that possible and I look forward to when we finally get to see a widespread public release of the bits.

The table achieved quite a bit of interest throughout the week:

Photo: Ry Crozier

On Wednesday I had lunch with Amit Mital who is the GM of Windows Live Mesh. Six of us (him, 2x MS, 2x others, me) spent a good 90 minutes discussing some of the longer term visions for Mesh. The original plan was for us to ask questions and him to answer them, but it became more of a discussion between ourselves about scenarios we wanted to see / achieve and him (relatively) quietly taking notes. In the end this was a better approach because it allowed him to walk away with some real world scenarios and didn’t result in us constantly asking him questions he wasn’t allowed to answer yet. PDC sounds set to deliver some exciting changes as we see the release of the Mesh SDK.

Friday lunchtime I was invited to present with Lawrence Crumpton about open source at Microsoft. We were presenting to a lunch of open source alliance and higher education administrators trying to demonstrate that Microsoft aren’t actually evil. Lawrence’s full time job at Microsoft Australia lies around open source and it was amazing to hear some of the things he’s involved in. I jumped on stage after his talk to demonstrate PHP on IIS7 as a first class citizen and talked about leveraging the platform with functionality like NLB. (This may or may not sound very similar to my DHH demo.)

Tech.Ed week is also a big week for Readify because it’s the only time we get to have almost all of our people in the one place. It’s a strange feeling knowing a whole group of people but then meeting them for the “first” time. It was particularly good meeting our new WA gang (Hadley Willan, Jeremy Thake and Graeme Foster) as well as catching up with the out of towners and management teams again.

Friday night was the Readify Kick-off party followed by a company conference / meeting on Saturday.

Who’d have thought I’d get to see my Principal Consultant gyrating his hips on stage with Kylie? I’ve had a quick look around Flickr and Facebook but I haven’t found any photos of the night online yet. I look forward to our resident photographers catching up on their uploads early this week. Update: Links at end of post.

Rog42 came along as a guest speaker on Saturday and delivered a great presentation about some new approaches for community. In a demonstration of how a little information goes a long way, the pizza thing is now pretty superfluous having seen his presentation but I think we can keep the jokes going for a little bit yet. It was encouraging to see the level of Readify involvement in Tech.Ed.

Overall it was a great week and another well executed Tech.Ed on Microsoft’s behalf. I was privileged to be invited to participate in lots of different ways, albeit with different qualities of outcome. It’s been an eye opening week which has highlighted needed work on my behalf, but also being rewarding for work I’ve already done. I look forward to the next event, and all of the other things that will need to be tackled between now and then.

Update 7-Sep-08: Photos from Thursday night courtesy of Catherine Eibner:

• Myself + @SteveGodbold: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceibner/2835355804/in/set-72157607154904785/
• Myself + @ceibner: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceibner/2835354650/in/set-72157607154904785/
• @ceibner + Myself: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceibner/2835354912/in/set-72157607154904785/
• More: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceibner/sets/72157607154904785/

Update 8-Sep-08:

• Added blurb about open source talk.
• Added link to Kylie video.
• Added link to Readify Tech.Ed involvement video.
• Readify kickoff dinner photos appearing here: http://flickr.com/photos/jakkaj/sets/72157607167191084/

Delicate Genius has posted an episode of DG.TV from last week’s conference.

http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=734

I can hear the spray cans further up the stair well. It seems the DPE guys are going guerilla in the Microsoft stairwells…

Being fairly focused on Microsoft technologies myself, I see a lot of the “us vs. them” mentality where you either use Microsoft technologies, or you’re part of “the other group”. Seeing Lachlan Hardy at Microsoft Remix was awesome – he was a Java dude talking about web standards at a Microsoft event. The more we can focus on the ideas rather than which camp you’re from, the more we’ll develop the inter-camp relationships and eventually destroy this segmentation. Sure, we’ll still group up and debate the superfluous crap like which language is better (we’re nerds – we’ll always do that) but at least these will be debates between the sub-camps of one big happy web family. (It’s not as cheesy as it sounds – I hope.)

What’s the first step in making this happen? Meet people from “the other group”!

The boys and girls at Gruden and Straker Interactive have put together Web on the Piste for the second year running. It’s a vendor neutral conference about rich internet technologies – so you’ll see presentations about Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight at the same event (among lots of other cool technologies of course). These types of events are a perfect way to meet some really interesting people and cross pollinate some sweet ideas.

It’s coming up at the end of August, and I understand that both conference tickets and accommodation are getting tight so I’d encourage you to get in soon if you’re interested (Queenstown is crazy at this time of year).

And of course, yours truly will be there evangelising the delights of Windows Live as well as ASP.NET AJAX to our Flash using, “fush and chups” eating friends.

Will you be there?

Late this afternoon, the Aussie twittersphere had a brief flurry of activity around the “web” track announcement for Tech.Ed this year.

The problem is that there are 12 sessions to cover everything “web” and UX – that’s one session on AJAX, two on Silverlight, nothing on ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 content, one IIS admin talk ….

As a result of this anorexic track size, lots of great sessions missed out. It’s great seeing people like Scott Hanselman and Jefferson Fletcher locked in. Alongside the official IE8 announcements though, it’d be good to something lik Damian and Lachlan’s boots-on-the-ground web standards talk. Jose Fajardo has been doing some really innovative work with Live Mesh, but there’s not even a single session scheduled around the Live platform yet. There *might* be something as a lunch time chalk talk.

I think the wider issue here is the track design – there are way too many web-related technologies to fit into a single track. As an idea for future years, I don’t think there should be a web track at all – in the same way there’s no explicit “Winforms” track. Web sessions should be distributed between the others. AJAX in developer tools and technologies, MVC in architecture, Silverlight in a new UX track, Dynamic Data in the Database + BI track, IIS in the server track, etc.

To allow “web developers” to find “web” sessions, sessions could be tagged with the technologies they include and ASP.NET would just be a common tag.

I use terms like “web developers” in quotes as I think this is now a very old-world view of developers and the systems they are building. Unfortunately I think it is this view that has driven the problems that we as a community are perceiving this year.

I’m still excited about Tech.Ed this year, I just don’t think they ‘got it’ with this track.

Being an Outlook addict, I’m always pleased when I see an “Add to Outlook” or “Download as ICS” button on a website. Everyone from Virgin Blue to Facebook do it.

Unfortunately there was no such file for Remix so instead of just loading it into my private calendar, I thought I’d make the ICS feed.

Here they are:

http://tatham.oddie.com.au/files/RemixSydney.ics

http://tatham.oddie.com.au/files/RemixMelbourne.ics

See you tomorrow / Thursday!

Update 21/5/08: Just in time for tomorrow, I’ve added the room assignments to the Melbourne file.