Beyond The Aspect

Ouf! I have given 3 presentations last 4 days, two in Warsaw at ZineDay 2008 (an event organized by a community of bloggers), the other in Prague, 30 km from home only.

Warsaw

There were 3 technical sessions in Warsaw and I gave 2 of them. The other one was delivered by Andras Belokosztolszki, software architect for SQL products at RedGate (and btw a Hungarian with a Polish name living in London).

I was seconded by Jakub Binkowski and we could deliver a real theater play together: he supposed to be new to AOP and asked questions, I answered. The result was great, I think. And much more funny for the audience! Ideally, I should do it this way every time…

The mini-conferences ended with a contest where 6 Polish open-source projects were competing. I loved the idea. Open-source programming is a very lone activity; electronic communication does not replace real contacts. It was great to bring people together and to be able to socialize a bit!

The winners of the contest were:

• Tytan.Net, a “power tools” toolbar for Visual Studio,
• NGinn, a workflow engine based on Petri networks.
• Log4PostSharp, a project I have been following and supporting for a long time, using PostSharp to emit highly optimized code to use log4net from custom attributes.

Prague

It was the first time I presented PostSharp in what is now my home country. I got an audience of maybe 50 persons, which is quite good by standards of other countries for events of this (small) importance.

The talk was in Czech. Although it is not my mother tongue, I master it quite well, especially the informal language, and the result was that it was much more funny than when I present in English. I even think that the fact that Czech is not my mother tongue played in my favor since I could take some licenses a Czech could not. So the first, theoretical, part of the show was great, but I think the second one was done better in Warsaw thanks to Jakub.

I also took the opportunity of this session to announce the release of PostSharp 1.0 RTM. I think it was great that I could make this important announcement in the home country of the product — and it matched fairly PostSharp’s calendar.

What a busy week! Tomorrow I go to Austria for a meeting with guys from Spring.NET…

-gael