Thinking Inside a Bigger Box

My presentation at JavaZone was riddled with technical difficulties this year. To make a long story short: I learned five minutes before the presentation the the projector would be inoperative for a while (turned out to be 30 minutes). This threw a wrench into my plans, as I had planned to open with a demo.

I have read many times on presentation zen about presenting without slides. But before I stood in front of four hundred people with nothing to look at except me, I didn’t really believe how effective it would be. I’ve never seen a more attentive crowd! Thanks, everybody!

I don’t know if I had dared to throw the slides away if I hadn’t been forced to do so. But my next talk, I want to do without slides, too. This really was a serendipitous mishap.

There will be a video available of the talk, sadly, I forgot this, and spoke in Norwegian when I learned it was an all-Norwegian audience. I will link to the video for my Norwegian readers as soon as it is available.

My talk at JavaZone went surprisingly well. The fact that the projector went dead and that I was planning on opening with a demo raised my pulse, but I felt I managed to get my message across and that people were happy.

The talk was about how we use Jetty to manage the full deployment life cycle of our application. I explained how we had implemented this and what problems we had solved. Here’s a quick summary of our life cycle process:

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“I just feel that in this company, there’s too many chiefs and not enough Indians.”

“Sure. Now, if they’d only been Indian chiefs.”

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