My Sessions

I gave my first session on Blackstone Event Gateways yesterday afternoon and again this morning at 11:30. I think it went well. I was trying to work on my pacing and speaking effectively. The MAX conference organizers give us access to a speaker coach, who gave me lots of great feedback on what I do that is good and (mostly) bad. I tend to talk really fast, run out of breath and mumble a the end of my sentances. Hopfully I didn't do too much of that. He also explained to me how I can completly get rid of al of the umms and ahhhs in my speaking. Great stuff and I hope I put it to good use.

My voice has been shot due to (at first) being sick but staying out late, drinking, and screaming at people in noisy bars didn't help much. The voice held out for Wednesdays session OK, and I didn't drink at all last night and I think I am getting better, so the voice was stronger this morning.

In any case, I had a bunch of people for the first(100-150+?), and a good number (50?) for the second go 'round. The feedback I got was universally good in that lots of CFML developers are very excited about using the gateway to do really interesting stuff. I really can't wait to see what people are going to do with this stuff. And since we gave Blackstone B2 to every attendee, I hope we get lots of good feedback in the Beta forums.

I finished really early in both sessions, much to my dismay. I was worried that I didn't put enough content in the slides, but I believe that I built in 10+ minutes for questions, and I didn't get that many. In talking with people about why this is, I believe it is because the gateway is so new, users are just trying to get their heads around the feature so they do not have the "how do I...?" and "Can you do..?" questions that (I hope) they will have next time.

All-in-all, I think it went really well. I love speaking about ColdFusion and I certainly can't ask for a better audience than we get at MAX.