thoughts.on.code

I’ve got a few talks coming up in the next couple months:

March:

Domain Specific Languages - I’ll be talking to the Omaha Dynamic Language Users Group on March 6th.    I will be focusing on the Groovy language, but may slip in some Ruby and Lisp.

Basic Spring -  This talk will be part of the Omaha Java Users Group March 20th meeting.  It will be a “nothing but Spring” meeting.   Nick Larson will be talking about Spring MVC, whil I will focus on the fundamentals.

April:

This year I will be presenting at Infotec, the local Omaha conference for Information Technologies, put together by the local AITP association.  I have one session and one tutorial:

Agile Java Web Frameworks - sort of an omnibus of the latest frameworks, and of course what a “agile web framework” is.

Introduction to Ruby on Rails - this will be a four, yes FOUR, hour tutorial  using Ruby on Rails.  I am so excited to be doing this!  We will be building an application from scratch, covering most of the features in Rails.
Should be a fun couple of months!

Last night I was given the opportunity to come back to Des Moines (after being there just two weeks ago with NoFluff) and talk with the Central Iowa Java Users Group. My talk was entitled “Integrating AJAX into the Enterprise”, which was very well received. Thank you to everyone there last night, I really enjoyed talking with you! The slides will be up on my Presentations page sometime today.Update: slides are posted now… enjoy!

Last night was the last stop in “Secoske’s Summer Speaking Tour 2006″ (I just made that up) and I am very relieved. As I have posted before, I had a lot of talks (at least for me) in the last two months-and-some-days, and it was difficult to prepare for all of them, but I have had a blast! This has been an amazing year for me. Speaking at NoFluff and OSCON, CIJUG, Omaha’s Dynamic Languages User’s Group, and of course home sweet home OJUG, I have gotten the chance to meet and talk with so many amazing people, doing amazing things. I have learned a lot about the technologies I’ve talked about (Ruby/Rails, Java Performance tools, AJAX) and a lot about me.

I really enjoy speaking/teaching. I first started teaching while in Community College (they let me teach Intermediate DOS). At that point in my path I was definetly NOT ready for something of that magnitude. I knew the material, but was not nearly confident enough to talk in front of a class (or any group of people for that matter). And I did not do the best job because of that.

Times have changed quite a bit since then (a decade ago already!), and today I feel a lot stronger in my presentation skills. However, every time I get in front of a group of people I still feel like the consultant/mildly retarded person in today’s Dilbert:

And frankly, I wish I knew too!

Anyone can speak

I have started to take another view of all this speaking stuff: I may not - am most likely not in fact - be an expert in whatever it is I am talking about, but I do know something about the topic, and I have my own experience and background that provides color and context to the topic, and that is the value I can bring to the talk. And you know what the absolute greatest thing is about this veiw? It says that anybody who wants to talk can provide their color and context to the discussion. And we all grow from that. The trick seems to be getting people to want to.

That is one of the big reasons why I push so much at OJUG for new people to get up and talk. I feel that we are a unique, local platform for people who have not had the chance or willingness to speak in public to get up in front of a group familiar people and talk about something that interests them. To that end, we (the OJUG Leadership) have been trying to coax people to give 5,10,15 minute talks on a topic of their choice (I don’t even care if its Java related, as long as they are passionate about it). I don’t want to sound too much like Kathy Sierra (not that thats a bad thing at all!), but when people share what they are passionate about, then we all get something out of it… we all are a little smarter.

Zen and Conversations

While I am rambling, I thought I would throw one more thing out there. Last night was great for another reason. I felt like I had a conversation with the people at the JUG meeting. I was slightly disrobed (not quite naked). And for those of you who have absolutely no idea (or are afraid you do have an idea) what I am talking about, visit Presentation Zen. I did not use a podium (haven’t in a long time actually… man that feels good), and felt like it was much more “talking with friends” than a lecture. And that is so awesome. I feel like I was able to convey so much more than my dry, cliche bullet point slides could have ever done if I had just repeated what was on them. I am really looking forward to the day when I do not need slides at all (going fully naked). I tried that once, when I presented Test Driven Development to OJUG, with just an open, empty word document and Eclipse. That was uncomforable, but liberating at the same time (and obviously difficult for me to explain). I am still very much learning (aren’t we all still very much learning?), and I am happy to be on this path.

My talks for OSCON 2006, and the Central Iowa NoFluffJustStuff conference are all up on my Presentations page. Go check them out!

I am starting the recovery process from 7 days of conference. I first talked at NFJS in Des Moines, IA over last weekend. Five minutes after my presentation I was on a shuttle to the airport to make my flight to Portland! And then it was 5 days of OSCON. It was awesome to go to such a large conference and meet so many people! It was especially cool to get to give a presentation to this great crowd.

I also had a lot of fun going to FOSCON II while I was out in Portland. FOSCON is a Rubyist gathering one evening during the conference, put on by the PDX.rb group. This was probably the most interesting single thing I saw, as FOSCON was held at FreeGeek, a local FOSS community center of sorts, which was PACKED. I took the pub crawl route with a number of others, and by the time we got there the pizza was demolished. Even so, it was great, and some really cool talks were given.

It less than 3 days now until the start of the Central Iowa Software Symposium NoFluffJustStuff conference in Des Moines, and just 6 days until OSCON. I am unbelievably excited to be presenting at both of these awesome conferences.

I have not started packing, which is something I traditionally put off until 2AM the night before I leave… I once started packing for a month-long trip to South Africa at 1AM before a 6:30AM flight. This time I will “Be Prepared”. My presentations are all set, and now I just need to keep the content flowing in my head (pretty easy thing to do when there is already so much open space ).

If you are going to be at either of these conferences, drop me a line and we can meet up for a drink.

Last night I was finishing up my slides for the No Fluff Central Iowa Software Symposium, and remembered Blaine mentioning that Code Complete 2 had some good advice re: Performance.

So, I went to local B&N and had a look. I had read the first Code Complete back in College, and man what a great book that was.

Well, from what I read last night Code Complete 2 is even better. I could only focus on the Performance + Tuning chapters last night, but they are a perfect example of pragmatism. McConnell shows so much sense that I bet some people just will not believe that his approaches could possibly work. You know, things like not worrying about performance until the code works… silly stuff like that.

One of the great things was that he showed more code, and it was updated to be msotly Java, with some C. As I skimmed through the rest of the book, I saw one example where he was showing how comments and poorly constructed code can have a compoundingly bad effect. The method created the trivially simple fibonacci sequence, but did it in such a way that it was impossible to tell without running the code in my head.

Code Complete, along with The Pragmatic Programmer and the new Practices of an Agile Developer are my three favorite books of all time. If you have not had a chance to read any of them yet, you need to.