GR DevDay Speaker Badge
Last weekend I made the trek up to Grand Rapids, Michigan for the GR DevDay conference. This was the second time I’d attended this conference but this time was special – it was my first time speaking at a conference! I was honored to have my talk “F# Needs Love Too” selected and to have been included in line-up of speakers that included some familiar names like Eric Boyd, Jay Harris, Michael Eaton, David Giard, and Jennifer Marsman.
My talk was in the first time slot immediately following the keynote. Considering I was up against some HTML5 and mobile development talks I was happy to see such interest in F#. I thought the talk went well and spurred some good conversation. Thanks to everyone that attended. Hopefully you were inspired to take a closer look at the language and see how it can change the way you think about writing software.
Having the first time slot gave me the rest of the day to attend other sessions. The sessions I selected were:
- Collaborate: Windows Phone and Windows 8 – Michael Perry
- Make Node.js Package. Become Famous. – Jay Harris
- Hot Data and Cool Cash – Joe Kunk
- Creating apps with high code reuse between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 – Jennifer Marsman
All of the talks were interesting in their own right. Naturally I was most interested in the two Windows Phone 8/Windows 8 talks and they didn’t disappoint. The other two sessions weren’t as immediately relevant to me but gave me some stuff to think about.
I’d like to thank the organizers for putting on yet another great conference. I thought the event was every bit as good as the last one and was happy to be a part of it.
Didactic Code 
I really enjoyed your talk on F#. I was somewhat familiar with the language before, but seeing specific examples that highlighted the differences between F# and C# reinforced what’s so great about it.
I would love to see more in that vein, especially in the form of a screencast showing off more saliva-inducing features like the type providers demo.
Thanks, Michael. I appreciate the feedback and am glad you were able to get something from the talk. I’m actually giving the talk again next week so I’ll try to emphasize some of those ideas a bit more.
Ooh, if you’re giving the talk again, you should record it and upload it. I wanted to show the talk to my coworkers, but the best I had was my audio recording, and it’s hard to convey code samples that way. :P
That’s a good idea. I thought about doing that for GR DevDay but obviously didn’t do it. Since this next talk is for a user group I can probably set up my camera there. I’ll have to see if I can find my power cord for the camera first though…