Web Dev Chronicles

I make the 90min trek to Seneca's York U campus last night to make a presentation to the PHUG on open source ColdFusion development. Unfortunately I had to make them do it on a night other than their regular meeting night because I have volleyball on Tuesdays. This translated to a fairly poor – ok dismal – turnout. I'm not bummed out about that though because it was a really good chance for me to work on a longer presentation and I learned a few things about myself in the process (more below). 

Brendan also had his new journalism recruit there to interview me on camera after. This was great because it's something I need practice at. I get all weird on camera. As I said to Dora the other day, I spend a lot of time trying to speak clearly with less pauses and umms which I think actually makes me stumble more. I'll probably have a few on camera interviews to do in Amsterdam so this was great practice. I'll cross post the video and recording of the presentation here once they get it online.

What did I learn about my presentation capabilities? If I take the time to do up slides ahead of time, I actually am able to commit the majority of the content to memory. I felt like last night I was able to get everything that I wanted to say out in a very natural and quick way. The slides actually slowed me down more. This makes me think two things: first, I need more visuals in the slides that I can just sit on while I talk. Second, I think I can cram way more information into every slide so that they are more useful as a resource after the fact.

I really liked how Patrick Keenan presented The Movement at the last FlashinTO. A series of simple, bold black text on white backgrounds. Just really key thoughts to base a discussion around. This is probably more useful for me to do. Some people use slides as cue cards but I find I really don't need that.

One thing that went really well last night was I showed how I could install Railo, set up a MySQL db and install Mango and did it all in about 5 minutes.

Right, so that was a bit of a tangent (read my blogs regularly and you'll find a master of tangents). The open source ColdFusion presentation was great. Projects like Railo and OpenBD are really getting people from outside the ColdFusion community interested in CF again. I'm going to do my best to evangelize CFML this year. I think it's finally time to get on this and get people into it. I've already got a revised version of this session in my head that I can do again elsewhere.

Presentation link for Open Source ColdFusion Development.

http://app.sliderocket.com/app/FullPlayer.aspx?id=08F13F85-D0AE-2914-9E21-F7C7C94B2818