After close to 6 months of planning, Dallas TechFest 2009 is… “in the books.” Planning and running an all-day tech conference with 40 presentations, 400+ (ok 401) attendees, X great sponsors, and Java and .NET developers is *totally* exhausting. I took Saturday off to relax and now I’m back on my laptop writing this review.
First, let me say, that it wasn’t just Java and .NET. That was just a joke because it’s always those two languages pitted against each other. Dallas TechFest was 8 technology tracks: Java, .NET, Flex, ColdFustion, Ruby, and Silverlight, and in those tracks other technologies were mixed in. Our great speakers present at user groups and conferences all over the country, they’ve also authored a number of books.
Anyhow, thanks to everyone that helped out. Tim Rayburn did an awesome job heading things up, and Chris Koenig was the guy that kept things moving when we were being lazy and blowing off responsibilities, and Omar Villarreal did great with sponsors. I was especially happy to see the returning sponsors. And lastly, I gotta thank Jonathan Campos for all his work, that was a great after party. I look forward to helping out again next year, given the chance.
Here are some relevant links covering the event:
Hi Erik, this is Jonathan Curran. We keep meeting each other at various events (DTF09, JavaMUG, SpringDUG, etc.). We recently met at DTF09 in the Spring 3 talk where I shook your hand and my name escaped you. Hope that jogs your memory a little.
In any case, I was wondering if you could help me out a bit. I will be presenting on Spring 3.0 basics at work next week (IoC, DI, beans & their lifecycle) and I was wondering if you or someone you know had any suggestions for presenting introductions to Spring material. Maybe something along the lines of: don’t get these 2 things confused or make sure to explain this well, etc.
Thanks,
Jonathan Curran
Sorry I missed your comment. If I’m not too late, I’d say start with what you mentioned. IoC / DI. Spring thinks of itself as a triangle, bringing you IoC/DI, AOP, and Testing. You could focus on how Spring enables those.
Hi Erik, thanks for the hints. The intro talk went ok, not too great, mostly because I believe they didn’t have something tangible to see how it fit in the picture (my bad). I will be doing another presentation on Spring, but this time with a small web app that they can relate to (local domain knowledge) with spring webmvc to show off how things fit together, etc.
Wish me luck and I’ll hopefully see you at the next Spring DUG.