Houston Tech Fest 2007 was yesterday and it was an amazing success. Over 600 people were present and I was able to see a lot of old friends and meet some new & interesting people.
I got to chill out with Brad Abrams and a few other folks from Microsoft, and it was great to meet Scott Bateman (fellow Houston blogger and advocate of Continuous Integration). His talk was most excellent, he was very informative and it showed that he not only understood the concepts, but he was able to explain it all in a way that (I thought) was easily grasped by the audience.
Some of the other speakers included Mike Azocar, John Cook, Tim Rayburn (sorry I missed your talk again Tim!), and David Walker.
Funny thing about Tim’s talk. I was in the room next door listening to David Walker talk about SOA and WCF, and we could hear Tim through the wall partition. At one point I heard Tim say, “If you can’t hear me in the back, please shout out and let me know.” I felt like shouting from our room 
.
I had two sessions, Advanced CSS & Javascript and ORM with NHibernate. In the first session, I had a full room (over 100 people!) and the audience was very engaging. It’s great to have an audience that has so many questions and comments on what you are saying. It becomes more of a dialog, which I think makes the content so much more valuable for everyone.
Sometime in the midway point of the talk the projector just turned off. It’s hard to give a talk on CSS without some visuals, so I continued typing and said “Imagine if you wil…” to a room full of laughter. About that time the projector turned on again. I didn’t find out until later, but my friend Wes had sat on the cord and unplugged it, then silently plugged it back in. Funny how a room full of geeks and nobody thought to check the plug when it turned off. Ah well.
At the end of the talk I had a couple people come up to shake my hand and a little 4–year old girl came up, touched my arm, then ran away giggling. (Don’t ask me…). I really enjoy giving this talk and I would like to branch outside of Houston and start giving it elsewhere around Texas (and the U.S.).
My second session was on NHibernate and it was more cozy, with only 15 people or so. I think NHibernate is a lot harder to make interesting for an intro class because it is a radically different way of developing applications that most people are exposed to. There is so much material to cover and only a short amount of time, so I tried to focus on the code and keep the examples short and simple. I think it was effective, though I’d like to branch off this talk and start giving more advanced lectures on NHibernate.
Thanks to all who came to the event (especially my sessions!). I hope you all had as much fun as I did.
The files from my presentations can be downloaded here:
File Attachment: AdvancedCSSAndJavascript.zip (1161 KB)
File Attachment: nhibernate.zip (4001 KB)
Also, a lot of people were interested in the tools I was using during my demos. My favorite text editor is E, which you can get at http://www.e-texteditor.com. My zooming tool that I use is called Zoomit. My launching utility is called Launchy and it saves me so much time everyday. I use ReSharper for Visual Studio nirvana (seriously, get this tool).
Some links I mentioned at the talks:
http://www.csszengarden.com
http://www.exploding-boy.com
http://www.mochikit.com
http://www.prototypejs.org
And finally, my favorite CSS book that I keep recommending to everyone: CSS Mastery.