Gradle talk on Javarsovia 2010 - presentation, source code and comments

Here come slides, source code and some comments on my Gradle talk on Javarsovia 2010. Enjoy!

First of all I have to say that I feel I did a good job there. It is always hard to judge yourself, but my opinion is base on the following factors:

  • the comments I received,
  • the fact that I managed to show everything that I wanted,
  • all examples worked as expected,
  • the audience seemed interested and asked some good questions (during and after the talk).

Shortly speaking - I'm happy! :) What makes me even more happy is that some preparations that I made (like few slides that I was prepared to sacrifice if I'm short of time or printed instruction on what to show during demos in order to remember everything that I wanted to present) paid off. Seems like I'm improving my presentation skills which is good.

Source Code

Source code of all examples that I showed (and more) can be found at:
javarsovia-2010 on github.

This is the first time I use github so please ping me if there are some problems.

Slides

Enjoy!

Notes

Some notes on this talk:

  • After my experiences from Java Camp #3 I decided not to bash Maven so much. :) Well, it is fun, but it makes some people feel attacked and they response aggressively. This time I concentrated on what good features Gradle inherited from other build tools (Maven included). IMHO it worked much better, I had no problems with Maven fanboys this time :) Being nice to people pays off. :)
  • During Java Camp #3 Gradle talk I got a very good responses when I asked about good features and problems of Ant and Maven. People use these two tools all the time and they really could tell interesting things. Also, few nice discussions emerged then. Unfortunately there was no time for such thing this time (the talk was 45 minutes only, uh...) and I had to simply present it myself, which is a real pity.
  • Somewhere near the end of your talk you should have few slides (or demos) that you can omit if you are short of time. I skipped two tiny demos - building and launching of web application and of desktop app. But they didn't show any new features of Gradle (apart from what I've already presented on slides) so the audience didn't miss anything. This way I saved some time which let me present a multi-module build (which was much more important and interesting).
  • I made a mistake during Q&A session. It was a very simple mistake - I tried to answer all the questions, including complex ones. It makes no sense. You hear a complex scenario, you don't understand it, but you desperately try to say something smart. Stupid idea. Would be much, much better if I said something like: "Hey guys, I don't think I'm able to answer such questions on the spot. Please describe your scenario and send me an email, or even better send it to Gradle mailing list." Another mistake was that I forgot to ask my friends to aks me the prepared questions. ;)
  • For some reasons sometimes my breathing was better heard than my words (via the microphone). I guess that was very annoying for the audience. My bad that I didn't stop the talk and asked the tech guys to help me set the microphone right. My apologies.
  • I prepared a very detailed cheat-sheet of what commands should I execute during the demonstration phases of my talk. It worked very well. During previous talks I had some problems with this (i.e. I omitted some important parts) but this time all worked well. Lesson learned!

 
 
 
This used to be my blog. I moved to http://tomek.kaczanowscy.pl long time ago.

 
 
 

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