Had a great time this past weekend at Houston Techfest. Attended a couple of great sessions and also presented a couple of sessions of my own. If you attended either of these sessions, please click the SpeakerRate links and rate the sessions and leave comments on anything you felt was missing so that I might be able to better present at future events.
Below are my thoughts on the two sessions I presented.
Deploying Rails Applications: Lessons Learned
This session was the weaker of the two. Reason being is I didn’t prepare enough for it. While the content was decent, it could have had a little more meat and a lot less fluff. This is something I plan to correct in all future sessions. However, the discussion, questions, and general feel of the room wasn’t bad. I just think that I could have done a better job of delivering some real content on this session.
Cross Platform Development with Mono and C#
This session was better attended than I had planned. In the past talks I’ve given on Mono and cross platform .NET development were sparsely (if at all) attended. I think a large reason for this is Xamarin, specifically their MonoTouch and Mono for Android products, and the interest they have generated in the .NET community for doing mobile development. This session had good questions, discussion, and I even managed to get a little “wow factor” in with the csharp shell from Mono.
Final Thoughts
Overall the experience was good. I think that I can do better next time, but given the size of the event and how well the sessions seemed to go in general, I think that I did okay. Again, if you attended either of these sessions, please click the SpeakerRate links and rate the sessions
Michael Koby 