Months of preparation for something that only takes 2 x 50 minutes. It sounds insane but people tend to forget how much work it is to even get one slide 'right', but there we had it my first GWT presentation at Jazoon '08 in Zurich -> Designing for user experiences - A business case for GWT and Gears. More about the actual talk later...
For me this was my first conference ever and I had no idea what to expected, the biggest question I had for myself was whether or not I would be nervous as hell. Short answer to this is no :-) I think when you are truly prepared and actually know what you are talking about and especially like sharing things with people these kind of things tend to go naturally, after all we are all just people ... we are allowed to make mistakes or to be nervous the only thing which can not be forgiven is when you know jack shit of what you are telling or just come not prepared at all.
At Jazoon there where two other talks about GWT. So I went out there to check the competition or actually to see what their topics would be so I would not bother my listeners with the same ones. The first one talked about real life experiences, not anything technical just the kind of projects they did with it, problems or good experiences they had with it. The second one was given by Adrian Buerki, I already met this really cool guy at JavaPolis last year so it was really nice to see him also doing his first conference talk ever. It went really well, he gave a high level introduction on GWT and a small demo and the end. This was what I was hoping for both talks did not enter the demystification level of GWT, so I was already hoping I could bring some added value to my attendees.
My presentation ... it had a completely different theme than the others. They both talked about GWT as a Java to JavaScript compiler whereas I believe this is not the 'core' idea behind GWT or the problem it is trying to solve. For me GWT is about delivering extreme user experience at no cost, user first, developer second, and that was also the intake I put into my presentation: Designing for user experiences. I'll not elaborate too much on the contents it self which you can have a look at
http://www.maartenvolders.com/jazoon08 but it started from user experience themes like 'First impression count', 'Attentive service', 'Attention to detail', 'Feedback' and 'The perfect experience' at to this I mapped GWT technology topics that could help you solve this problem. Not an easy approach because such conferences are packed with only technical people caring about the hardcore technical stuff. And that was what I wanted to avoid because for me GWT is the first web technology ever that got the fact that when you build something for user you should think about the user first and not start from a technical design pattern or tool vendor perspective like JSF.
My talk started at 14h so I went to the cinema room around 13h30. Two guys already sat in the room, I guess they kinda fell a sleep during the last one and never left the room but it seemed they stayed for my talk either way :-) The sound guy arrived around 13h45, we tested the mikes, switched the presentation to the big movie screen, everything was prepared ... the count down started. I started counting people when they came in, I guess during the first 50min I had around 80 - 100 attendees. Not bad for a first time speaker I think. Not too much not too many great for learning the trade of conference speaking.
Minutes counted down, still not nervous. The clock on my cell phone told me it was 14h, time to speak that first word. And I have to admit that it a very strange feeling, I was not nervous at all but knowing you have to open your mouth and speak that first word kinda scared me a bit ... still a people were coming in the room so at 14h02 I finally took a deep breath and said 'Welcome....' and from that point on all went seamlessly.
But and I think this was one of the flaws of the organization is that nowhere they informed people about the required skill level of a talk. For me this was medium and sometimes definitely expert level. But when you asked around a lot of people even never heard about GWT, and the rest heard about it but never used it, I think only 15 max really were doing GWT development. This did not really surprise me because I already had the same feeling when I went to the other GWT talks, it seems GWT is still too new for many people. But anyway the presentation was already prepared for a more advanced level so no way back.
Time flies, and that is even an understatement because I thought at how the hell am I going to fill up two time fifty minutes but before I knew it the first fifty minutes were up. I saw some very confused faces from people never even heard of GWT and now having had no basic GWT intro having to swallow some in-depth deferred binding stuff. So yes, I lost some people after the first session, not only because of the topic but it is a conference so some already informed at the beginning they in the second half they would attend another session, so no problem.
Second half started, I continued with diving into in-depth GWT stuff like inline preserialized objects, inline selection script using linkers and so on... I think it went well for the first time. I ran out of time like everyone of the conference so my Gears stuff kinda fell off. I only had like two small questions at the end but when people start leaving the room the real questions came and I was delighted that at least I could inspire some folks with now ideas and insights and moreover convince them that you should not think about GWT as a widget library but embrace and learn the power of the compiler before making engineering decisions.
So for everyone who attended, thanks for listening!
Lessons learned from my first talk:
- I'm used to given course and I made the 'mistake' (because I did not knew better at that time) to actually build a kind of course instead of a conference talk. You really need to be up there to experience what a real conference talk is all about.
- Conference talks should be really about one specific technology, so in my case I actually covered a lot of GWT stuff, next time I would just focus on one thing the compiler and its power and leave all the rest out.
- Amuse the mob I can't focus on this enough but small jokes can really save you during a talk. Make them seem spontaneous but in fact study them and pick a right time for it in your talk. For example I had a slide during the 'Attentive service' topic that showed a barmaid given a drink to someone and the text on the slide read 'The barmaid remembering your drink' but what I told was the barmaid remembering your name ... doing so in a room filled with 99% guys this had some kind of effect ;-)
- Time, yes time your slides if you time 50 min then it will take more than 60 in practice.
- Being a non native English speaker adds an extra hurdle so try to do a dry run before the mirror exercising your pronunciation, because during a talk you'll find it much harder finding that English word you want...
Conclusion, I'm satisfied with my first talk ever, much room for improvement but what can one expect from a first time. I have to admit it gives you a kick being out there and it definitely ask for more ... so I hope you guys seeing you next time ;-)
Labels: gwt, jazoon
