Microsoft Virtual TechDays… The Aftermath
Thursday, September 18, 2008 – 1:39 AMIt was a little odd speaking to two hundred people in India via Live Meeting while actually sitting in a completely empty office in Redmond at 1am. The biggest thing you miss is any feedback from the audience. Are they bored or sleeping? Are they shaking their heads in disagreement? Did they laugh at your joke? You can’t tell any of this over Live Meeting.
It felt very weird. But as Hunter S. Thompson once said “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”.
People asked quite a lot of questions at the end which was great and stuck with me through some technical difficulties with the phone. But as a speaker it feels unnatural to say the least! Maybe one day I’ll get back to India and can speak in person.
This was doubly ironic seeing as the talk was on… you guessed it… Distributed agile development and for the most part I was talking about the importance of improving communication. The point being driven home by a series of dropped conference calls through the presentation. I guess now I know what being remote really means.
Why am I writing this and not sleeping? Well the Ade Miller – never fails – get hyped up on caffeine and sugar beforehand has some down sides with late night speaking. I’ll scrape myself off the ceiling in another half hour and go to bed.
Welcome to my blog on software development and probably a whole lot more.
One Response to “Microsoft Virtual TechDays… The Aftermath”
That was always the hard part for me doing customer presentations via LiveMeeting. Removing that feedback loop of the audience interaction makes it extremely difficult – especially when you are doing topics like yours. But it sounds like you did a great job, so congrats!
By Cory Foy on Sep 18, 2008