DevTeach Open Source Panel recording now available on .NET Rocks!

Although I chose the wrong line at the border to reenter the US, adding an extra 45 minutes to the wait, I successfully completed my first solo trip into Canada to sit on the DevTeach open source panel.

You can find the recording as .NET Rocks! episode #296

And since this was in Canada, I can now say I’m an international speaker! (hey, it counts people. It counts.)

Special Thanks To…

Thanks to Richard Campbell for being an amazing host.  It was great chatting with him before the event, and i hope to chat with him again in the future.  Also thanks to Alan Griver for not allowing me to back out at the last second.  And special thanks to Beth Massi for giving me a thumbs-up whenever I, as a deer in headlights, looked at her in the audience for moral support.  lol.

What I was trying to say was…

I prefer to practice all of my talking points (usually for hours) prior to any speaking event, whether internal or external, to avoid panic (omg! i’m being recorded!) and brain freeze.  To me, I train for public speaking like I train for kata in karate – you practice over and over again until it is second nature.   Unfortunately, i didn’t get as much time to prepare as I would have liked, but I started to relax somewhere in the middle of the podcast, and actually started to have fun at the end.   Although some people are just naturals at public speaking, I am not one of them, but yet I love public speaking, so I keep trying, because one day, i’ll make it look easy.  =D

The first question regarding the "mixed model" is a perfect example of the "brain freeze" moment.  Wow.  I actually submitted a paper to OSCON 2007 that discussed this very topic, yet it never even crossed my mind at the time.  What should have crossed my mind was, "Absolutely. A popular development model is the platform play, where the core is open, but the add-ons are close / proprietary.  However, what we discovered with the power toys for visual studio is that you can actually reverse the platform play, where the core is closed, but the add-ons are open.  And looking in this space where the add-ons are open, could this form a developer ecosystem for traditional proprietary software applications? My theory says yes."  I described an instance of this theory, which unfortunately didn’t illustrate the higher-level  "reverse platform play" concept.  =(

Learning Eclipse, Teamprise, Subversion…

I should have stayed as long as it took on Thursday at the conference to have taken people up on their offers to teach me Eclipse, Teamprise, and Subversion.  I was so excited to see people coming up to the stage afterwards (and I liked the feeling of being tall – i’m 5’1) handing me biz cards, saying that they would find time during the conference to give me demos.  I’ll kick myself for a long time for not making the time.

Unfortunately, I was flying out that Sunday to go home for a month due to a medical family emergency, so I was greatly distracted wrt my time allocation.  My sincere thanks to Jonathan Wanagel and Jim Newkirk (my manager and manager’s manager) for their support for letting me work remotely from home during this time, and especially in their immediate response to my request.

I still need to contact everyone who handed me a card to brainstorm some creative ways to take them up on their offers to teach me this brave new world.  We will figure it out, even if it is becomes a phone call guided walkthrough. 

And thanks to everyone who has listened to the podcast and actually read this far!  And to repeat what I said all the time last … Towards a stronger open source ecosystem!!