360Flex Mate Workshop Recap
Wow! What a ride. This was my third 360Flex and my first time presenting.
While I've spoken at Law School conferences and twice for the online ColdFusion user group, this was my first workshop and my first time presenting at a developer conference. Presenting live to your peers is always the toughest. You walk in knowing you are NOT the smartest guy in the room. In fact, you're lucky if you are in the top half.
What I didn't know, but found awesome was how supportive developers are. Sure there was a minor revolution when a handful of people didn't like my method, but more people came up after and complimented me and offered suggestions for making the workshop better.
So, what was my method? Break it down like a Flex 101 course except for the Mate Framework. While, in theory a good idea, there turned out to be too much time spent typing basic flex code. I think this was my first offense. My second was to dive into the material after a VERY short explaination about how Mate works. My assumption was 30 to 45 minutes of theory was less effective than getting our hands dirty in the code. Truth be told I could have spent 20 minutes at the beginning talking about "theory" before diving in.
I also plan to rewrite the workshop and "pre-bake" the UI. We will focus on the events, model and event map. This will satisfy those who don't want to type as much, and we'll cover more material. I will not back down from my belief that a hands-on workshop doesn't need to be so "hands-on". We wire our brains by doing not watching. Otherwise, I'd be hilarious after all the Daily shows and Colbert Reports I've watched. Sadley, I'm a poor stand up comic. Maybe, I need to attend a "stand-up workshop". It couldn't hurt my presentation style.
If you attended my workshop, and you want to give me suggestions for improving it, I'm all ears. I'll be rewriting it in May and lining up a June or July workshop.
All that being said, I completely understand how challenging it is to try and compress a workshop that should be over a couple days into a couple hours.
I was personally struggling with keeping the framework concepts, the method names, and Mate code structure straight. So after the theory part of the talk if you kept going back and forth between code and the data flow slide it would be very helpful. For instance, as you start getting into code, keep coming back to the flowchart of the data flow and drop in the method/variable names so we can see how it all comes together.
The bigger challenge (and I saw this in almost every other session) is how to deal with the diva developer. There's always at least one. The person who has to question how you code something. The person who has to get hung up so much on standards that they can't overlook the fact that we are getting a quick demo.
For some reason many developers don't seem to acknowledge the fact that coding is an art. We should all follow standards, but we will still solve problems in different ways - and thats's fine.
Sometimes for demos, its better to "code it simple" than to "code it right" if it means that people will understand the concept better. I'm sure some will disagree with that. But as long you state that it's just for demo purposes, they should understand.
So my answer to those people is "When you get home, you can code it however you want, but for now, in my session, this is how we are doing it. Let's not get too hung up on personal approaches. The focus is on the concept. If you have questions on the framework, feel free to ask, but let's not get hung up coding approaches."