So another DevTeach, this time in Mississauga, has come and gone.

Previous ones I have been an attendee; this time I was a speaker. I was honoured to be selected and proud to be chosen to discuss a few topics that I have been learning and playing with for me. Overall, I think it was a great event. It was a new venue (was held at the MS offices in Mississauga), so was slightly different than the hotel experience. My first presentation went pretty well; thanks to James Kovacs for selecting me for it as well as providing some assistance during the talk. My second one… not so much.

Some hardware failures immediately before (read: 5 minutes) meant that I started a bit late and some of the features I wanted to show were not working as well as I wanted. So, this leads to 2 things that I have identified for me: First, Windows Updates can kill your machine right before a presentation as you never know what it will do. Second, buy a new laptop. I now have justification.

For those who attended and saw my talks, I thank you. Although I have spoken locally in Winnipeg before, this was my first speaking event to such an audience. I took a lot of the feedback (good and bad – especially the bad) and am working it into an action plan of how to move forward with doing better the next time. More demos, less jumping to the meat but putting the plate out first, that kind of thing. For those that were not as thrilled with my SketchFlow talk because of the issues with the machine (and I am one of them), I plan on creating a few webcasts of what I did. These webcasts I will post on my site (or elsewhere with links from here) to the videos so as to make up for the not-as-great-as-I-wanted talk.

Well, time to board the flight home. A lot of lessons learned, and some new things to consider as I move forward.

Cheers!