So I presented at this year's JavaPolis. It was quite a day and inspired me to blog again.
What do I mean by an exciting day? And wasn't JavaPolis a five-day conference?
While I would've loved to attend more of the conference, I had prior engagements during the week so I eventually flew over to Antwerp in the morning of the last day of the conference and flew back home that same night.
So what made this short trip exciting? To start with, I hadn't been to JavaPolis before so I was curious to see the atmosphere and energy level. Conferences are like apples and oranges--you can't really tell how it's like without experiencing it yourself. Also, it was exciting because my flight was 2 hours late.
Landing half-asleep to Brussels, I thought I'd be in a hurry just to make it to my own talk until I remembered the one-hour time difference... Phew! It was a huge relief to figure out I had a full hour more time than I thought. I had also requested a GPS navigator from Avis and they hadn't replied back confirming whether I would have one or not. And I had no idea where in Antwerp the venue would be so that could easily affect my being there on time...
Eventually everything went fine and I found my way to the venue some 80 minutes before my talk. I even got lunch, which was a good thing because I was starting to get hungry. It was unfortunate, though, that I didn't see as many sessions as I hoped. Anyway, I did see Olav Maassen and Chris Matts do their Real Options talk, which was quite a show! Absolutely top notch. And the content makes sense, of course.
So then it was show time for me. I presented a 60-minute talk on TDD, titled Test Driven Development: Beyond the Acronyms. I had planned to finish with a short live demo using some kind of a canned example but eventually decided to not go there. "I've stopped using canned examples for demos in my trainings so why should I use one here?" So I buckled up and asked the audience for a problem to use for the demo. And it worked great, as usual. (People have often told me how brave I am, taking such a risk in front of an audience but it's actually less risky than using a canned example!)
The screen-in-screen display they have at JavaPolis was otherwise excellent but it turns out they need to plug a USB cable to the computer in addition to the VGA cable. And this meant that I couldn't use my trusted old remote control for paging through the slides. Why? Because the damn USB dongle is shaped such that it practically takes both USB slots on my MacBook... (Which is why I just put in an order for a new remote that has a tiny USB dongle.)
I did feel a bit uncomfortable since I've grown attached to having a remote but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I also got good feedback after the talk, which is always nice. There are also some blog entries around, written by folks who attended the talk. The talks are going to be gradually published at Parleys.com over the next months so if you missed my talk this year you can catch up in 2008... And please do consider dropping me some feedback. I'd really appreciate that.
After some corridor discussions and a dinner with a couple of ex-colleagues of mine, the conference was starting to near its end for me as we had to head towards Brussels again. It was a long day and I was quite tired when I finally got home. It was an exciting day.
I'm already looking forward to next year's conference, although next time I'll stay overnight...