CQRS/ES Road-trip lessons learned at
NetworkUA conference at Kharkiv was amazing! It felt a bit unofficial and practical all way through. Attendees, organizers and final feedback were just great.
I couldn't even wish for a better start for our CQRS/ES road-trip.
There was a outstanding panel of speakers - Sander Hoogendoorn (no frameworks), Ayende Rahien (no-SQL), Greg Young (DDD/CQRS). Note, how all these talks are focusing on keeping things simple and practical.
I was presenting on event-centric development (we had the same setup with Greg as in Vienna, where he was doing crash course which I follow up with small bits of practical experience and applying all that in various projects).
Obviously, my talk was far worse than presentations of Greg or Sander (well, that's just 2nd time I'm doing this presentation, as opposed to 50th of Greg :), but certain things come only with the experience. Next time it will be better.
Sheer lack of time felt a lot: rushing through slides to fit into 45min talk. I was probably talking too fast. But we did catch up with some Questions and Answers in the corridor afterwards (blocking the entire corridor with a small crowd for quite a bit :)
Lessons learned:
- Prepare core structure of the presentation and work it out (i.e.: enough for 20 minutes of a talk).
- Identify pieces of presentation that could be gradually added or excluded, depending on the lack or abundance of time.
- Make sure that you are heard well (not all conferences will have head-set mics).
- I need to finish the FarleyFile sample on CQRS/ES (or, at least, finally publish it as it is).
Of course, in addition to the actual presentation-related skills, there were quite a few things learned during the after-party and unofficial hang-outs. But that's more technical (I'll blog about some things later, as promised).
Speakers arrangement was amazing - small group, passionate about development and all agreeing on learning and keeping things simple. This made the final panel quite interesting as well - sharing motivation, inspiration and vision of future.
This actually makes an interesting rule for the future, when deciding whether to participate in a conference or not.
Feedback after the conference was incredible. People were sharing emotions and thanks to the organizers. Well, I'm still receiving emails and DMs. The most important thing: developers are interested in exploring, trying and learning. So they probably got something out of the conference.
If I were to help in organizing European CQRS conference some time later (as discussed in the community) - I know much better now how it should look like to be educational, inspirational and also beneficial for the community's progress. Fun included.
Thanks to Akvelon and Sigma Ukraine for providing an amazing atmosphere. To speakers - for providing the company, sharing ideas and experience (the morning is a bit rough after the last after-party :). To Microsoft - for providing a great framework and tooling for exploring all these ideas.
In short - I've learned a lot already, making this CQRS/ES road-trip really educational already. And this is just the beginning.
We'll have an Event-centric IT Cafe in Kharkov today. Then on Monday - we'll start to move slowly in the direction of Kiev towards Event-Centric weekend (depending on how things work with the developers out at the cafe).
Published: October 16, 2011.
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