DDC- the aftermath
Now that I've had some rest (overdid the long days during the conference, and it was pretty obvious I had by the time Wednesday rolled around), I'll round out my posts about the conference.
Clear Proofs of My Lack of Divinity
I suppose I started in bad form on my initial blog with the crack about "junior staff". Sorry, Patrick- while it is arguably technically true, I don't really think of it that way. After many weeks of not getting any of my work done because of all the mini-tasks that kept coming my way [I've been filling in for our lead as she is on vacation], I thought it might be fun if they flowed down to those left behind [although it looks like that didn't happen- such is life].
On day 2, I gave Don Burn's name as "Don Burns"- hard for me to catch the difference since one of my childhood pals happened to have the Burns surname- it just comes naturally to me [I've now corrected that typo].
On day 3, as intimated, my lack of sleep and other health problems made for a tough time- in 1996, I ruptured a disk in my neck, and spent many months with numbness, pain and other side effects of pinched nerves as a result. Something I did over my recent vacation has resurrected some of that for me. I've several times had to leave a meeting because the pain reached points where I couldn't sit still. I suspect bowling Monday night didn't help, either [but I can't spend all my life doing nothing, and it was my choice, after all]. At any rate, mostly that's something for me and the physician to take care of- but it nagged me all day, and that and poor physical condition really dragged at me all day. It takes you from tired to even more tired, for one thing...
My highlights
People treated me really well- I got a lot of positive feedback about the blogging and my NTDEV involvement. I've turned back on the email nozzles from the OSR lists, as a result. I'll try to manage that as a part of my normal workload and see if I can't achieve a better balance of community involvement and my other workload. It meant a lot to me to get that kind of feedback, especially from the MVPs, the OSR folks, and some of the non-MVPs who are still frequent contributors to the OSR lists.
WDF in general got good marks for community involvement [not that we were perfect, just that we were doing better than most]. The technical sessions I presented at seemed to have received fairly good marks [although those are preliminary results]
While much of the other feedback we received was not terribly positive [and in some cases that could be taken as an understatement], it was frank, and generally thoughtful. I'll get back to that in a bit.
Also especially gratifying was my co-presenter's individual performances. Wei and Ilias in particular improved markedly from their initial attempts at our presentations [Shyamal was pretty much on target from the beginning]. I also think Neslihan [while not a co-presenter, she is a part of our immediate team] did quite well for her first time out. Moving outside our team, I caught most of Tanya Radeva's presentation [had to leave early because of my neck problem alluded to earlier]. It brought things that I "knew" but hadn't fully linked together into a coherent whole, which I thought was a good thing. Good technical depth.
Lowlights
My primary disappointment was attendance at our coinstaller presentations- it was very low both times. I'm thinking that perhaps the issues are now well enough understood that nobody felt there was a need to dig into the issue further.
Attendance at the Ask The Experts session was also a surprise- the ratio of Microsoft people to customer people was way off. There were some good issues surfaced, apparently- but I might have done better myself if I had got some rest, instead [hindsight].
In hindsight, I think the test talk [the one myself, Shyamal and Wei presented] probably went for too much breadth and the depth suffered as a result [but time limits are time limits].
There was some disappointing and disconcerting feedback, of course- it's hard to hear that some of the same old issues are still there to be seen- I allude some of that to the difficulty of cultural change. We shall see.
Plus the physical problems I noted weren't fun, but life can be like that- so that one doesn't count- the food was pretty good, and free- so that makes up for it!
Following up
The feedback presented is being followed up on. I know it's being aggregated, analyzed, and suggestions for improvement are being made based upon it. I fully expect feedback to the feedback will be given [but that will come above my pay grade, so don't take this as a commitment, just my own expectation or assumption]. Under the circumstances, I of course have no idea what form that may take, either. But I will note one WDF-related topic was suggested as being blog-worthy, where I had previously been directed specifically not to discuss the subject. So once again, that feedback does matter. How much each will have to judge for him or her self.
I intend to cover some of that missing depth I alluded to previously in future posts, and can also cover other technical issues once the proper public announcements are made. Because my "Life at Microsoft" tag isn't something I really want to have to place on every single post I make...
Now listening to "Ship Of Fools"- Grateful Dead from the "Steal Your Face" album
