Registration opened yesterday for ~350 people + a wait list. It DDD has broken records again by being booked up in about 1 day!!!
I didn’t believe it so I went to the registration site and sure enough it says that it is accepting registrations to the wait list only.
I’ve just had a confirmation email through that my session has been selected for DDD6.
A panel of experts will answer the audiences questions on the subject of recruitment chaired by Colin Mackay. This session is for you if you are looking for a job and want to find out what companies are looking for. You are trying to hire someone but don’t know what to look for. You have been burned in the past and don’t want to repeat the experience. You have a question about recruitment no one else seems to have an answer to.
There will be a question box on the day for you to post your questions, but if you want to email in advance, you can email your questions to colin@scottishdevelopers.com. Submissions by email close at 23:59 on the 23rd November.
The panel is:
Sarah Blow: Founder of Girl Geek Dinners and software Engineer. She has grown up around technology and HR with parents in both industry sectors and works closely with Women & Technology and companies to create a better understanding about how women may be recruited in different ways to men.
Barry Dorrans: Senior consultant for a major consultancy and Microsoft MVP. When interviewing he takes the red pen and becomes intellisense for whiteboards.
Frank Kerrigan: Development team lead for an insurance company’s internal development team in Glasgow. His team writes enterprise applications for internal customers using C# and SQL Server. Frank has been in devolvement and support of enterprise systems for 15 years.
Karl Lightfoot: Recruitment Consultant that for the last 9 years day in day out has only been recruiting developers in the Midlands region for the largest IT Recruitment consultancy in the UK. He has successfully recruited for large and small corporations through different market states of the supply / demand of talented Developers from Visual Basic 3 to .Net 2005.
I’ve submitted three session ideas for Developer Day 6 in Reading. A 60 minute session on recruitment (which has been a recent theme on my blog and other places), a grok talk on taking the panic out of the presentation and a micro presentation on SQL Injection Attacks.
I guess I’m looking forward to the micro-presentation most because it is such an interesting format. 20 slides of 20 seconds each. I’m basing the topic on a presentation I did a couple of years ago as I still see lots of questions on SQL in forums where the original code is susceptible to attack.
The grok talk, “Take the Panic out of the Presentation”, it to encourage people to get up and talk at community events by letting them know how to get over their anxiety of public speaking – It isn’t as hard as it sounds.
The presentation that I’m doing really isn’t a presentation. I’m chairing a discussion on the subject of recruitment. There will be four panellists from across the UK and from different types of company so hopefully it should be a lively discussion as there is a lot of opinion out there about interview skills, what should go on a CV, technical testing and so on. The questions will be supplied by the audience in advance so that I can figure out what is most popular and devote time to these things. The audience will be able to interact as well and be able to offer their opinion too.
Of course, these sessions have to be voted in first.
Tags: 
ddd6 developer day sql injection attacks recruitment presentation grok talk
It is now possible to propose a session for DDD6. It has only been open for a few hours and already there are a few good sessions available. Now I’m in a quandry. If this is the quality of all the sessions I’ll have no idea what to see. Not to mention that I’ll be submitting my own session idea.
So, if you have a session idea then get over to the DDD website and submit your session idea.
Tags: ddd ddd6 developer community community microsoft tvp developer developer developer
I’ve now received the feedback from the talk I did at DDD5. For the most part I thought the scores I received were fair. There were a couple of really scathing comments, but most pointed out things that I should work on to improve my presentation style.
The averages (out of 5) for each of the 4 things I was marked on were:
Most people did give me a lower mark for presentation – which I know I have to work on. I’m not the best at turning an already dry subject into something really exciting. A number of people commented on my initial nervousness, which is also true. I think that is something most presenters have, I’ve just not managed to hide it as well as some other people, and other than to a group of 4 developers at work this was the first outing for this presentation so I wasn’t sure how it was going to be received.
One interesting comment was to use yellow highlight. I though I did, but it turns out that my laptop is set to cyan. I will take that on board as I was looking at the screen in front of me rather than the projected image the audience saw.
The same person also suggested I use something called Zoomit. That comment seemed to concur with another that the fonts were too small. However, other than a brief moment when I first fired up Visual Studio, the fonts were set to 16pt which, when I asked the audience if it was big enough, I was told was perfectly readable. However, Zoomit may be useful so I’ll get that installed.
It also seems that I paused when moving between the code and the presentation. I agree that is something I have to work on. I am not good at multitasking, which is probably why didn’t say anything, however someone else suggested that to ease those moments it was best to just verbalise my internal thought processes just to let the audience know that I was still doing something. So, that is something I’ll try to do from now on.
One commenter said that I “introduced terms and abbreviations without explaining them”. I’m usually quite careful about that, but I’ll watch out for it in the future. It would have been nice to know what the terms were, that way I will be more conscious of them in the future.
One person was highly disappointed that I didn’t know much about TypeMock. Since my aim was to talk about the concept in general rather than about individual frameworks I didn’t think it was important to the presentation. A second person would have liked me to have delved deeper into the workings of RhinoMocks, the framework I was using for demonstration purposes. So, it would seem that people are interested in specific technologies. However, in a one hour session it would have been impossible to have explained the concept then shown off every aspect of each of the various frameworks, or even a specific one. It was, after all, only an introduction to the subject.
If all this seems a bit negative, it is because I’ve concentrated on the aspects that I need to improve or felt I had to address. I did get some very encouraging comments, including:
Also, if I take out the the two scathing comments (outliers it’s called in statistics) out of the 35 people that filled in feedback my score increases a little bit. I don’t know how valid you think doing that is (but it makes me feel better):
Tags: ddd5 feedback talk mock objects presentation
John Thomson was kind enough to send me a couple of photos from my presentation on An Introduction to Unit Testing with Mock Objects.
I’m told that the head count was 65+ for my session
Tags: ddd5 photo presentation mock objects unit testing microsoft tvp reading
Well, DDD5 was earlier today. It was a great day with lots of really interesting talks. So far this has been by far my favourite DDD. The first session was my own. I did a presentation on an Introduction to Unit Testing with Mock Objects.
By far the best speaker of the sessions that I attended was Gary Short who talked about Agile in ISV Vs Enterprise. It was informative, funny and entertaining. In short (no pun intended) Gary brought humour to an otherwise dry subject. This was especially needed as his audience would otherwise have been dozing off after their lunch. I am definitely going to try and get him to repeat that talk in Glasgow sometime.
Afterwards was the Geek Dinner. This was held in a restaurant at the side of the River Thames. The location was wonderful, the company brilliant. The weather wasn’t either – it was bucketting down. Also disappointing was the food, or lack thereof. What I got was in no way worth £16 per head, both myself and John had to go to McDonald’s afterwards to “top up”. It was fantastic to try a different venue after going to Pizza Express the last few times, but this one didn’t work out in my opinion.
Over all a great day made better by a fantastic community
Well, I’m back from DDD4 (Developer Day 4) in Reading. It was a fabulous day with some very intersting speakers. I particularly enjoyed Daniel Fisher’s presentation on Data Access Layers and Ben Lamb’s session on “How to write crap C# code”. Joanna Carter also gave a very interesting presentation on reflection performance – her solution was curious and I’ll have to follow it up although I would probably put it into the unorthodox category as I would never have thought of using lightweight code generation to generate some IL then execute it in order to compensate for some speed problems with creating an object through reflection.
I also did a 10 minute Grok Talk on the subject of Mock Objects. I’m in the process of putting this up on my website and it will be available at some point in the next few hours.
I’m also in the process of putting together some photos of the event. You can see them here. More photos will get added shortly.
NOTE: This post was rescued from the Google Cache. The original date was Monday, 4th December, 2006.
Additional note: The Grok Talk presentation on Mock Objects is available.
Tags: grok talk ddd4 mock objects presentation reading microsoft tvp
Actually I don’t know how quickly Developer Day 5 sold out in. It was announced on May 30th and I noticed on June 2nd the registration page had a notice on it that any further registrations would be going directly onto the wait list. 350 (approx) developers signed up and packed out the venue in less than 4 days. That is simply amazing.
What is more interesting is that this event is taking place on a Saturday (out side office hours basically), so everyone attending is doing so in their own time. Developers are recognising that they need to keep their skills current.
I also know that there are quite a few people travelling, at their own expense, from Scotland. I’m sure there will be people traveling from the north of England also. So people are willing to put their hands in their pockets for somewhere in the region of £200+ expenses to go to this.
What gets me is that for the most part individual people are paying for this themselves. And for the most part it is their employer that is going to benefit. I wonder how many employers are actually helping their employees pay for this?
Tags: developer day ddd5 developer developer developer sold out software development conference employer employee pay travel expense
NOTE: This blog entry was rescued from the Google Cache. It was originally dated Sunday 3rd June, 2007.
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