Crazy Or Genius?: DevEast Aftermatch

DevEast Aftermatch

Sean — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 17:25:00 +0100

Yesterday was the first DevEast conference. Kudos to Derek for putting together an interesting panel of speakers in such a short order of time, as well as bringing in at least 40 attendees. There really were some interesting talks. In particular, I enjoyed Mike Mullens’ talk about Next Generation Web Apps.

As for my own talk… well… it could have been better. I tried to go for the live ‘wow’ factor of doing some live code. I mean, if I could create a rails app from scratch in a short amount of time, that would be pretty awesome right? Of course, if I made a mistake somewhere… which, of course, is what happened.

My fellow speakers later gave me a few tips:

Live code is a trade off between something you can depend on (pre-done code) and something more interactive and impressive to the attendees.
If you are going to do live code, you have to fill in the time you are coding with speech, otherwise you stop engaging the audience for a period of time, and risk losing them a bit.
Practice beforehand. The more comfortable you are, the less likely you are to screw something up.
If your live demo goes wrong, use the above practice code to get back on track. Kinda like those cooking shows where they make the batter, and then put it away and pull pre-made cookies out of the oven.

After the conference, a few of the speakers headed down to Rogue’s for some beer and food. We talked some shop, various stories were told, and Derek tried to get some sound bites for his podcast (I wonder how that turned out). I thought those guys were hilarious and was glad to have had the opportunity to meet them all.

All in all, it was a pretty fantastic time. Maybe I will ask to give a talk at next year’s DevEast and have things run a little smoother.

"DevEast Aftermatch" by portrait artist

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 06:02:56 +0100

Sean,

Unfortunately I missed DevEast because I had to attend another conference. Regarding live code, I once had a funny and embarrassing experience about that. I was delivering this talk involving live codes some time ago but in the middle of my discussion something went wrong with the code. I forgot how I got through it. Luckily, the audience was very understanding and they too agreed that live codes in speeches or talks are really difficult to handle.

All the best, Jacqui

"DevEast Aftermatch" by 程控电话交换机

Fri, 11 May 2007 08:17:30 +0200

The vi is mostly due to habit now. When I started Rails there was no IDE for it.

"DevEast Aftermatch" by Sean

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 01:46:42 +0100

Hey Spiro,

Thanks for your words. I recall a few people asking me why I used vi instead of a graphical interface for my Ruby programming.

The vi is mostly due to habit now. When I started Rails there was no IDE for it. Also, all my development is done on a sun server (Debian), rather than my Windows machine. For the most part, it just works for me, so I haven’t bothered to try any of the Ruby/Rails IDEs. Maybe I should look into some of the ones that are out there now.

"DevEast Aftermatch" by Spiro

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 19:22:13 +0100

Hi Sean,

I was at DevEast and found your presentation rather interesting. I also had to laugh at some of the questions (will not refer to them here though). One of the questions was related to IDEs and I found some IDEs that have Ruby implemented in it (KDeveloper for KDE on Linux…oh noooooo….Linux). I know “vi” is in e-VI-l, so here is an alternative. I prefer “vi” myself.

Anyways, to cut this short, good job and continue the good work.