An awesome experience

Yesterday was my big day. I finally got a chance to present some of my experiences working with the P&P software factories and factories in general next to Mister Software Factory Don Smith and Mister Enterprise Library Olaf Conijn. In the morning I did actually attend a session (not worth mentioning), but I've used the remainder of the day to visit Don and Olaf's session on the Service Factory : Modeling Edition, and to prepare our big session in the afternoon. The original plan was to have only a maximum of 15 minutes of speaking time, but Don thought I would be much more interesting to actually be there for the entire session and adding my personal experiences to all his sheets! Well, that was risky but very cool.

While approaching the session start time, I became more nervous by the minute. But after I finally climbed on the stage, I started to feel more relaxed. We all thought that the session went great and the interaction between me and Don appeared to go smoothly. Unfortunately, the ratings did not entirely correspond to that feeling. The 500 attendees had some trouble coping with three speakers in one session and did not really like the demos. Apparently they were expecting more personal experiences and process related aspects of software factories (which we have a lot of to share). Ironically, the TechEd organisation urged us to have a lot of demos. Well...what the heck... it is not happening every day that somebody gets to have his first public tech talk at the auditorium of the European TechEd!!

My colleague Arnold-Jan recorded the introduction on video. Check it out here (it's about 18 MB, so beware).