This week was a week of firsts. It was the first meeting for the try {harder} conference. It was the first flash conference I have ever attended and it was my first time speaking infront of a group of my peers on a topic I feel passionate about.
The idea behind the conference was to introduce a smaller (16 people), more intimate conference environment where the key was to learn and inspire. And in that goal it certainty succeeded.
The fact that everyone had to give a talk encouraged attentiveness and participation as you knew it was only a matter of time before you were in the same situation. It also reduced the stress that comes from speaking to so many very intelligent people.
When Stray contacted me to suggest that my talk's topic was to be on haXe I was very uncertain. I didn't feel like I had enough experience with haXe to confidently speak about it having only worked with it for less than a year. It turned out however to be a good thing, it pushed me to find out more about haXe, research some areas I had heard about but never investigated.
When constructing my slides I knew that I could never cover all of haXe as its such a large topic with so many interesting facets. I decided that I should probably concentrate on targeting the talk towards my target audience. That is very experienced Actionscript and Flex developers who probably had heard of haXe but never really had any impotence to pick it up and use it any more.
With that in mind I structured my slides around what I considered the big advantages of haXe over Actionscript or Javascript. I also knew that my audience are all very experienced programmers so I tried to give plenty of code samples and examples.
Anyways, at the end of the day I really enjoyed preparing and giving my first talk at try {harder}. It was well received and I just hope I have succeeded in inspiring some more people into investigating and using haXe.
I wrote my slides in google docs which are viewable online: https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dc6wvdg5_151frv985w7
The code samples and examples mentioned on slides are uploaded here: http://mikecann.co.uk/projects/TryHarder.zip
Michael, thanks for sharing! Wish I could be @ try {harder} too! Sounds like an awesome idea! Wondering if Stray wants to go international and have a similar event in San Francisco as well. I am happy to help.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I think the the link to the GoogleDocs slides is incorrect.
Ahh yes, thanks for that Bruno, I have fixed the link now.
ReplyDeleteYes it was a really interesting way to learn and share ideas. I would certainly be interested in such an event :)
I was meaning to speak to you actually, I believe you know another one of the attendees, Alec McEachran? He was telling me about how your company is going to use haXe for your next project, he couldn't tell me what the project was but it made me smile to hear about wider haXe adoption. Makes me hope that one day I could get a job / start a company using haXe primarily.
[...] Last year I was fortunate to be one of the lucky 16 to attend the first try { harder } experimental conference / coder retreat in Nottingham. As mentioned in my blog post at the time it was an incredible 4-day event in which I learnt so much from some of the most talented and experienced people in the flash community. [...]
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