Interactive Conference Talks
Update: How it went; see below.
You may remember my plan to create a really interactive conference talk - one that would help people learn by getting them involved.
I'm doing a 2 talks at the Ajax Experience next week. The first of the talks is a fairly straightforward intro to DWR, the second is the really interactive session where we are going to write a simple multi-player game using DWR on the free wifi.
We're going to keep the source readable by anyone as we go so you can really get involved with what's going on.
I'm not going to attempt to write the game from scratch because that would be very boring. I'll arrive with all the support stuff in place, and just put together the important pieces live. So it's going to be fast paced, and it's not *that* likely to go wrong.
Update: How it went
All the feedback I got for the talk was really good. But, perhaps the best was the notes saying the talk was simple. That's great feedback, because the talk was not simple. However, that it came across as simple, is fantastic news.
There are 2 reasons it wasn't simple: We covered a lot of ground, there were areas of DWR that I've never talked about before. I recently spoke on DWR and Ajax for Calista in Sweden for 5 hours, in a more conventional format, and we covered topics in this slot that were not in the 5 hour version.
Bram (who did all the typing) and I were not prepared for all the firewalls that we would have to evade. The hotel wifi totally blocked all inter-pc comms, which is kind of a problem for multi-player games. Our solution was an ssh tunnel bounced off this server. It killed bandwidth, but the game worked anyway.