Tuesday, February 5, 2008

ArcReady Cleveland - 2/5/08

This morning was the ArcReady Cleveland event with the topic of Service Lifecycle Management. This is a very valid topic these days with more and more organizations creating services and not really having any strategy on how they plan to update/upgrade those services.

Josh Holmes kicked off the event, introduced us to the speaker and then promptly disappeared until the giveaways at the end. Well, he was there for the break too. Josh not speaking at this event didn't detract from anything though as the speaker was quite capable and didn't need any hand-holding.

So the speaker, Chris Madrid (at least I think that was his name), had his slides together for a different event I'm guessing as he skipped over the majority of them but still managed to get his point across. Josh is supposed to provide a link to download the entire presentation for those interested. The first half of the talk was about concepts instead of practice and while that is very appropriate for an architect talk, he was moving fairly quickly and people weren't engaged. He then demonstrated a little codeplex app they have built that acts as a service gateway and adds capabilities such as versioning and logging. Nice app that they are hoping to keep up to date but as it's not a sanctioned product you get what you pay for.

Unlike the last couple of ArcReady events, the crowd was dead quiet until after the break. He about had to beg us to start talking. I think the biggest barrier to conversation was that very few people in the crowd had any relevant experiences to share. Once he got to demonstrating the app people really started to get it and conversation (mostly in the form of questions) started. The talk was oriented towards enterprise IT departments instead of at ISVs so not everything translated directly but he did make a good case for the usefulness of at least having a corporate-wide defined strategy as for how to deal with service lifecycles.

There were three to four times the number of attendees as were at the last ArcReady event including numerous people that I 'think' read this blog (which is a small number). I ran into an old co-worker, a current recruiter trying to lure me away and several other devs trying to get a code dojo/camp started. Hopefully with some of the contacts I made to day we will get enough momentum going to actually start an event.

As far as I know the next event I'll be reviewing will be the March 13th launch event. I may attend a SIG or UG before then but XNA and Ruby don't fit in my path so I doubt it.

Oh, and the streak continues, no prize for John.

2 comments:

Sarah said...

Sounds like a neat presentation. I was wondering why MichaelDotNet had tweeted that Cleveland started to wake up.

Did you at least point those interested in forming an event up here to the NEODevEvents Google Group?

I'll probably blog on the XNA presentation the day after - unless I have enough energy after the presentation.

And to feed our crack addiction, the mobile Twitter URL is: http://m.twitter.com. If you can get the Internet on your phone, you should be able to get the mobile page.

Michael Letterle said...

I did evangelize NEODevEvents a bit, and Corey Haines started to as well. Hopefully we'll see some activity there soon.

Oh and I only use the mobile twitter ui :)