Fiddling with Hardware at C4DI

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Jon Moss gets things started.

We had a great evening at the C4DI tonight. It was another of the “You Really Should Be” events and just to make it even more interesting I was giving one of the presentations. But first we had Jon Moss, making the point that “You Really Should Be speaking at events”. He made a great case for talking in public, not least because it is fun once you get going. He also made the very good point that the aim of a presentation is to get your audience to do something and what this is should be set out and reinforced at the beginning and the end of your presentation, when the audience is most engaged.

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My Audience. Thanks for the applause.

Then it was my turn. My topic was “You Really Should be Fiddling with Hardware”, and I’d brought along some hardware that I’d fiddled with, including coloured lights that can be controlled over Bluetooth from my Windows Phone. Everything worked, eventually, and folks clapped at the end, which is always nice. You can find the slides from the presentation here.

Next up was John Polling who reckoned “You really should be working on a side project”. By side project John means something which takes you into new areas and helps you develop your skills. I like the sound of this. I’ve always found that the technical things that I’m not really supposed to be doing are the ones that I find the most interesting at any given time. By formalising this and giving an outlet for folks who want to make something different you can get happier developers and some surprisingly useful outcomes.

Finally we had Steve Fewster. who rounded things off with “You really should be - developing apps for the ‘Global Cloud Accounting’ community”. I’m not that familiar with accounting, but I do know about the cloud and how lots of business process is now moving into it. Steve, who is in the business of providing tools and services that add value for cloud users, took the line that “There’s gold in them thar hills”. In other words, the market is just getting going for people who want to bolt their ideas onto cloud based accounting systems. The system makers are keen to encourage an app infrastructure and so they make it easy to create apps and there is lots of scope for neat ideas to become the next big thing.

All in all, a very thought provoking and enjoyable evening. Thanks to C4DI for putting it together.