First presentation over!

Well, I'm sitting on a train home from Nottingham, where I've just been to give my first presentation on Visual Studio 2008. This one was to the good folks at Tribal, who were having their first 'Devfest'. Their company's grown quickly and has a lot of disparate offices writing very different applications for different sectors, and they have had very little visibility 'till now of what was going on in the rest of their company. As such, they've had a couple of days to get together and find out what's going on - and also to hear about some new Cool Stuff^TM from me.

So after a hectic start to the week for me, in which I did little else but make sure all my demos worked, and did all my homework on some of the deeper features of my little product, I journeyed off to Nottingham yesterday afternoon. I had a short stopover in Birmingham, where Julie, fresh from Ghana (where she'd been volunteering in a clinic for a month) and Terra, fresh from bed, came to say hi. After that is was back on the train up to my destination, where I arrived to find things not exactly as planned.

In my optimistic view of yesterday evening, the lovely chap from Tribal I'd been having a laugh with via email would meet me at the hotel, and introduce me to the rest of the group. I'd then wait around for the other Microsoft guy who was coming along to turn up, before settlng in for drinner and drinks. As it was, after I'd checked in (and been upgraded to an 'executive suite' for some reason), I got a couple of text messages. My friend from Tribal had a dog-related emergency, and so wouldn't be along that night - and just to outdo him, my friend from Microsoft (who I'd also never met) had a mother-related emergency, and wouldn't be coming at all. So, once I managed to drag myself away from my sumptious suite (eleven lightswitches, need I say more?) I decided to just go looking for the crowd of geeks.


_{I imagine executives in the 70's designed the hotel's decor...}

There was an unfortunate lack of glasses and ponytails, but I was fairly encouraged by the exclusively male table of pale, skinny folks in t-shirts who'd gone for the 'burger and chips' option in the restaurant, when pretty much everyone else had a suit on and a plate of nouvelle cuisine in front of them. Once I'd wandered over and ascertained that yes, these were to be my drinking and dining partners for the evening, all was well, and the conversation especially interesting.

It was quite gratifying (friends everywhere sigh as my ego becomes yet more inflated) to hear from all of them phrases such as "Can you believe he got a job at Microsoft straight out of University" and the inevitible question of 'how' - which I mostly answered with vague references to illicit rituals and bribery. Once I'd said I came straight from uni they seemed under the impression I was a graduate rather than a student, and I managed to avoid disavowing them of this illusion without lying outright to anyone. I never really want to tell partners/customers I'm only on a placement, I think it would take some weight away from my words - hardly ideal given that I'm relying on them to trust me in order to get them dabbling with possibly unstable technologies.

There was a bit of a blur of names and new faces in the bar, but the words 'Can I get you a drink?' were a very satisfactory common denominator, and I left the bar at some late hour, sensibly only a little tipsy, given that I was planning on doing the 9am presentation. As it was, the other guy from Microsoft who'd stepped in at the last minute (and arrived at 8.30am that morning) took the hangover slot, though I had to be on my feet there to help answer some of the very tricky questions these guys poised. It's a lot harder when your entire audience is from a single company, as product specific questions are fair game - so they can come out with some really specific stuff and expect you to know the answer. We got through that one unbloodied though, with good responses to all they could throw at us - though I was empathic and a bit anxious after watching one of his demos fail to work.

I managed to get through my presentation unscathed, with all of my demos working exactly as they should (once I'd snipped out a couple of bits that were unachievable thanks to my breaking of SQL server a couple of nights ago) - and in record time too. LINQ, which normally takes me about 2 to 2 1/2 hours to demonstrate only filled up 50 minutes of my hour and a half to two hours slot - leaving a lot of dangerous Q&A time, and me to demo lots of the other cool functionality that I wasn't quite as confident in. The guys all seemed pretty impressed though, and are going to take the product on, so job done there - just another presentation tomorrow to go, and then I get the weekend off. I say off, I mean, I get the weekend to prepare for the day long event I'm organising on Monday :(

On the way back I had a longer stayover, and popped back to visit my old house in Birmingham, and to sit through Julie's fascinating but interminible set of four hundred photos from Ghana - as well as to see all the cool stuff she'd bought there (taking advantage of the horrific exchange rate which made everything dirt cheap). I got a present - a handmade top (below) which is pretty ace - and picked up various things I'd left behind. I also realised how much of a snob I've become in my fancy Reading house, can't believe I used to live like such a student *wink*. It was quite amusing, and a little touching, to find out that things I'd left behind had been nicely stored, waiting for a decision on what I wanted to do with them. For things like an acoustic guitar, this was fair enough - but, four tins of peaches? I was rather bemused.

Anyhow, enough of this rambling, I think I'm finally done with this train journey - time for some sleep.