The folks at JAOO have posted a video of a conversation with Chad Fowler, Marcel Molina, and me recorded at last year’s conference: What makes code beautiful?

Thanks to Kresten for organizing the fun conversation and posting it!

This weekend I debuted two new talks at the Great Lakes Software Symposium: "Tag-Oriented JSP Design" and "Software Development Heresies." They were both well received, and at the same time I got some good feedback that will improve both talks for next time. That's the ideal situation.

It was a funny process, though. When I proposed those two talks, I was very excited about Heresies and thought that Tags would be "just another tech talk" -- good, but nothing particularly special. Then as I was preparing the talks, my opinion reversed: Tags looked like a great talk that people would be really pleased with, and Heresies looked hazardous: if the audience didn't want to join the discussion, it would potentially be 90 minutes of Glenn Vanderburg mini-rants, and even I think that gets old pretty quickly.

The actual outcome, however, was yet another reversal. As I said, they were both well received, but Heresies was the one that really rocked. Everyone was interested, there was a lot of energy in the room, and a lot of interaction. Two comments from evaluations have me walking on air: "Nice job of turning my world upside down" and "... you were by far and away my favorite speaker with the 'Software Development Heresies' talk."

The smart thing to do with speaker evaluations is to treat them like figure skating scores, throwing out the lowest and the highest. So that last one gets thrown out of the official tally, sadly ... but I can still bask in it for a little while. :-)

And maybe I'll trust my instincts a little more about what makes a good talk.

Most of my compatriots on the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour have blogged about the first symposium of the year, so I guess it's my turn.

I'm excited that things are rolling again. These are excellent events for the attendees, and also for the speakers. I'm always energized and enriched by spending a weekend talking to the other speakers and the audience members about software topics. (You'll notice that both the quantity and depth of my blogging has decreased during the break since the Atlanta symposium at the end of November. I expect it to begin picking up again now.)

This weekend in Austin I gave five talks. The two older talks (Introduction to XPath and Java Web Start and JNLP: The Return of the Rich Client) were both well received, and the three new ones went much better than I expected:

• Concurrent Programming Utilities -- I had a nice crowd for this one, and they were excited to learn about utility classes that can help them build better concurrent systems. More than one person said that they wished they had been to my talk a year ago, because it would have saved them a lot of grief.
• Introduction to Aspect-Oriented Programming and AspectJ -- I need to work on a better demo and a few more diagrams to help illustrate some tough concepts, but folks liked the talk anyway, and I don't think I lost anyone!
• Project Infrastructure Values, Principles, and Practices -- This is my favorite talk of the bunch, and it also went really well. It ended up being about 20 minutes too short, which was unfortunate for this time, but it's nice because it means I'll have time for some demos and more in-depth information next time around.

I'll be doing the same slate of talks at the Northern Virginia Software Symposium the last weekend in March. I can't wait!