DDD6 Feedback

I got my feedback from my DDD6 talk today. Ben's already blogged about his, so I feel honor bound to do the same. Me a copycat blogger? Surely not :-)

I was very pleased with it; most people gave me 4 or 5 (unless that's out of 20?) Some of the comments were very kind:

"best session by miles"

"This one was great. I've already started looking at Spring.NET and Windsor."

"Really enjoyed this session. I got the impression that Mike was a 'doer' rather than an academic."

Some of the other comments pointed out failings in my presentation that I need to work on if I'm going to do more in the future:

"A great topic because it was more about a concept rather than being "here is a product and this is how you might use it". There was however, too much jumping about between PP and code giving me the impression that maybe the session wasn't rehearsed."

"The presenter would have benefitted from using two screens. One to show the powerpoint slides and one to show the code demo."

"Buy a proper laptop :-)"

I definitely agree about 'jumping around between PP and code'. I think I must have looked like a yoyo because of my compulsion to stand up when addressing the slides and the need to sit down when showing the code. As for the laptop, I now have a VGA cable.

For some people I just didn't present it at the correct level:

"I am completely new to the subject and as such did not find this enough of an introduction."

I think this is the trickiest thing when doing technical presentations; do you assume your audience know nothing at all about the subject, or do you assume they are experts? When I've done workshops and presentations for my clients, I usually have a good idea of the competence of the audience, but at DDD, you just have to take a guess. In fact it's worse than that because you can guarantee there will be both complete newbies and battle hardened experts on your chosen topic. With the IoC container talk I tried to aim it at myself about two years ago; someone who's tried TDD, knows a bit about patterns, but hadn't really grepped the full power of IoC and hadn't yet encountered IoC containers.

All in all, it was a very satisfying day and a great opportunity to share ideas. I think it's wonderful that there's a thing like DDD where total nobodies like me can get a chance to rant about their favorite obsessions. Long may it continue.