Best practices talk

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I gave my Teched talk at 5PM today, entitled “C# Best Practices - What's wrong with this code?”. Rather than take a more lecture-based approach, I tried something more interactive. It was an interesting, if not fully successful talk. If you attended, please leave me some comments - what did you like, what didn't you like, etc. If you didn't attend, you should see slides on the dev center *eventually*.

Good:

  • The warmup went well, with laughs where I expected to get laughs, and many of them better than I expected.
  • I got to jump off the stage and go out into the audience, something I also like to do.
  • I got lots of questions afterwards, which is always a good sign.

Bad:

  • I didn't get as many answer from people as I expected. That might be because the material is too hard, or just no accessible in the time I spent on it.
  • I missed points on a few of my explanations
  • I had one glaring error in an explanation that was brought to my attention later, which I should have caught. The guidance is still correct, but I hate those kinds of errors.
  • The snippets part was fairly dry, and could have been more interesting.

Overall, I think it went fairly well, but I haven't talked to anyone in my group, so I don't know what they think.

Oh, and the worst part was that I had to share the stage with two rack mounted servers that made it really hard for me to hear anything.

Afterwards, one of the room supervisors told me that the talk was SRO, and that it seemed to be a “younger crowd” than many of the other talks. I'm not sure what to make of that.

Overall, I'm not sure how happy I am yet.