Time to reflect back on the good and could-be-better aspects of my Customizing dotText presentation at Code Camp 3. First of all, thank you to those who attended the session. You were great! Please ping me here or use my contact form if you want to provide any observations and thoughts.
The session was held in the Providence Room at the MSNE offices, which is more of a small meeting room with a center table than an actual auditorium-type room with rows of chairs and a podium in front. The group was small (around 15 attendees), but they were engaged and made my job incredibly easy. We went around the room before the presentation because I assumed everyone was a blogger and we would discover each other by face whom we've known only by blog. It worked out good for me, since I got to meet
SB Chatterjee,
Aaron Junod, and
Jason Haley, each of whom I've been wanting to meet for a long time. I also got to meet other interesting cats, too, like Jim Bonnie. I was surprised by the fact that 50% of the attendees had never blogged or were just getting started blogging. It also suprised me that during the introductory time half of the attendees never heard of
Community Server. So I strayed from message to cover CS, which seemed necessary at the time to properly introduce dotText in context of current events.
In retrospect I think it would have been better to get into the flow of the presentation before talking extemporaneously about dotText and Community Server. With the informal and more intimate settings I relaxed my presentation guidelines. Its good to be flexible, but I think it would have been a stronger presentation had I been more disciplined in staying with the script.
Technically speaking, everything worked like clockwork. Four VS.NET dotText applications going and real-time website examples from 3 different sites worked without incident. I don't recall any dead spaces due to searching through code in Visual Studio or losing my place at any point. Some web pages loaded more slowing than others, but they caused no awkward periods of silence.
I was definitely excited about demonstrating dotText but was not nervous about the presentation aspect. Excitement about the material is a good thing and it kept things moving at a brisk pace, but walking through code examples, jumping between classes and concepts of a given dotText mod may have come off disjointed and a bit rushed at times. I could have relaxed a bit and still projected an enthusiasm for the content.
I didn't like feeling that I was being so deliberate while speaking at points, particularly while addressing less-technical topics that required speaking off-the-cuff. Non-planned, non-technical topics are going to arise and with practice I hope to respond more naturally and with less forethought. I don't talk much, as I've written before, and hate to think that I need to start talking more in my life just to give presentations in a more natural voice. That's a pretty heavy price to pay.
I was happy with the amount of content we covered, which was everything I had planned in the slides. I was also pleased that we didn't linger on any one issue or veer off course on some less-relevant issue regarding blogging, podcasting, or in speculations about dotText's future.
Speaking of dotText's future, I'll be blogging on this more, but for attendees of the session in particular I want to say that I am moving away from dotText and to Community Server at my earliest convenience. For new blogs I am recommending Community Server and not dotText. So while everything I said about the elegance of dotText and how incredibly much you can learn about .NET when working in dotText is true, the future is Community Server. Maybe for Code Camp IV you all can come to my Customizing Community Server presentation.
J