I just returned from this, and as I hoped it has raised my interest in the framework.
This was, apparently, Paddy’s first public speaking experience and I have to say that he did a very good job.
The slides and structure were well thought out and prepared, and delivered spot on time, in fairly conversational but to the point manner.
We spoke for 5 minutes afterwards, he’s a very nice guy and it was good to see that we were in general agreement even if using different frameworks.
He started out with pureMVC at about the same time I did with Cairngorm and it would seem that our experiences and the benefits we’ve received are pretty well matched.
One of the points of his presentation was to recommend use of a framework (any one of the many alternatives) in general and held pureMVC up as being a good example.
That said, it’s got to be an almost impossible task to cover this sort of topic in one hour, to a mixed audience. I also saw Neil Webb’s cairngorm presentation last year, although that was probably rather easier for me to follow since I was already using it at the time. I think that knowledge helped me a lot with this one as well, but even so it’s hard to follow once someone goes through the code in even a small demo app. I’m unsure about how useful running through code actually is in this sort of limited timescale, though I guess it depends on the context.
I expect it did go over a few peoples heads, even when I knew roughly where it was going (as I said, I’ve looked at it before, read the docs a few times even if it was a while ago) it was still a little hard to follow so much in a short time.
I had a brief conversation with Tink about his flash on the beach 2007 presentation, where he asked if there was enough detail on the actual code. In his case, I think he got it pretty well spot on for that one. It was a fairly quick and sparse overview, pointing out the important points and things to look out for. For me, that’s ideal, since I can look over the code later, check out those points and see how they fit in. However, that was for a rather smaller example of flex skinning, and to go over a whole framework in 20-30 minutes is ambitious, maybe too much so.
No easy answer to that one, really, except to take more time perhaps!
In any case, I was after an overview, and I got a good one, so many thanks for your effort Paddy!
I also enjoyed Rob Bateman’s talk on the history and current state of 3D on the web, I was unsure if I was going to stay for that, but glad I did.
It was nicely delivered,and free from any hype (I’m slightly cautious about the current enthusiasm for 3d, and Rob seemed to understand very well the point that it’s great *where appropriate and well done*)
Hi Jim,
I agree, I had some doubts myself about how useful it would be to go through actual code, given that it was only an hour long slot (I’ve felt a little overwhelmed by other presentations which have done likewise) so this is very useful feedback for me.
I’m giving a talk on the same topic in Milan and Edinburgh later this year so I’m tempted to drop the code from the presentation altogether, concentrating more on getting people familiar with the concepts. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any suggestions
Shame I missed this talk!
I just can’t make up my mind on this one Neil!
I have the feeling that the essential barebones Cairngorm code is shorter, and probably worth showing a very brief example.
However, that could just be my very own mixture of bias and pure ignorance in this particular case!
New frameworks all look pretty frightening to me until I’ve spent a bit of time writing something with them, made a few mistakes etc etc.
It was in fact your tutorials that helped me overcome that with Cairngorm, thanks!
Your presentation did have prettier pictures as well!