At the speakers dinner the night before the conference:
Ola Bini: “Do you have any actual code examples in your talk about clean code tomorrow?”
Me: “No”
Ola Bini: “Well, I’m sorry but that means I can’t come and listen to it”
Not such an auspicious start perhaps, but fortunately about 125 other conference participants didn’t seem to mind the lack of actual code, and did turn up for my talk. Some of them even blogged favourably about it. To my surprise, some guy came up to me afterwards and said he helped organize the JFokus conference, and did I have a Java talk I could give at it?
It was a lot of work preparing my presentation, and I got some really useful feedback from the two practice runs I did, at GothPy and for my colleagues at IBS. It was this feedback that prompted me to take out all the code examples I originally had in the presentation, actually.
Overall the conference seemed to go really well. There were about 450 participants, about 40 speakers, and 6 parallel tracks. I attended some great sessions, too but I’ll leave a summary of them to another post.
Just in case you were wondering, I didn’t go to Ola Bini’s talk either 😉
