I am pleased to announce that registration for DDD7 is now open.

Here’s the link you’ll need:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032393874&Culture=en-GB

Technorati Tags: DDD, DDD7, registration open

As part of another exercise, I have been looking through the speaker lists for the seven DDD Reading events that we’ve run in the UK so far.

Thinking about the number of unique speakers who submitted sessions vs. number of sessions submitted, I pulled the the information from each of the first seven events to produce this graph below. Note that this graph isn’t limited to those speakers who made it on to the agenda – it contains data relating to those speakers who submitted one or more sessions.

DDD1 was obviously the first DDD event – it had a hand-picked agenda. As I recall there were a couple of cancellations, so pretty much every speaker who submitted a session made it on to the final agenda. I can’t remember the precise details behind the use of “developer developer developer” as the conference name, however it is obviously a hark back to Steve Ballmer’s famous pitch (of which there are plenty on YouTube). Of course, this is also the reason why the speaker to sessions submitted ratio is virtually 1:1. DDD1 came about after I was invited to look at an Excel spreadsheet containing a list of speakers and sessions…the next thing I knew is that I had a spreadsheet with an agenda on it, then a date, then a registration process, then an event (coinciding with my wedding anniversary)…it happened so fast!

DDD2 was the first, and last, DDD to have 30 minute sessions. We had hoped that the 30 minute sessions would be appealing to new speakers who may have felt that 60 minutes was too long. Whilst that was perhaps good for the new speakers, it was a scheduling and practical nightmare…although it seemed to work pretty well on the day. This is what happens at events – the attendees can have a whale of a time, whereas the organisers can see all the imperfections that make an event hard work for them. Luckily the DDD team are hard-skinned individuals who are keen to experiment and learn, so we take on-the-day problems with a pinch of salt and think “learning experience”.

DDD3 was almost a 1:1 speaker to session ratio. It was also the first time that Dave McMahon used his Sunday name “David” as part of a session submission. The key change for DDD3 was the introduction of community voting. Instead of relying on instinct to build an agenda, we asked the attendees to vote for the sessions that they wanted to see on the agenda. This has two main benefits. Firstly, it help us with room scheduling – if we know a session received 120 votes then we know to put it in a room that can handle at 120 people. Secondly, it means that the agenda is community-driven, we get to build an agenda that the majority of attendees are going to be interested in. Of course, like all systems, it’s not as precise as this and we do have to make some scheduling decisions, e.g. there might be two speakers discussing the same topic, we have to work out how best to handle that. I think that tells you that we don’t often take the first 20 sessions – it should come as little surprise to you that we look at the first 30-40 sessions, often settling on the 20 out of 35 sessions. With more and more speakers submitting two or more sessions, the chances of them getting more than one session in the top 25 is moderately high.

DDD4 was an eye-opener, fewer unique speakers, but those that did submit sessions were submitting one or more. This is a trend that has continued to this day.

DDD5 was originally planned to run on the first day of England’s World Cup match. You would be surprised how hard it is to plan developer events around the variety of sports that are competing for the same audience!

DDD6 “sold out” within 24 hours. DDD is clearly a popular event. After all, it is free, it is held on a Saturday, there are bacon (and veggie) rolls in the morning, there’s a free lunch, 20 full sessions, lunch-time grok talks, swag, discounted books, access to many of the Microsoft DPEs, an evening geek dinner (at your cost!)…it is no wonder that 350 attendees are driven to the registration site within seconds of it going live. We also had SQLBits (thanks!) sponsor coaches from Reading railway station to Microsoft’s TVP campus – feedback for this was good, so we’re hoping to run the same coaches at DDD7.

DDD7 saw us skip the summer DDD slot. We ran DDD 1-6 every 6 months, after DDD6 we looked at the year ahead and felt that so much was going on in the “2008 space”, that postponing DDD until November 22nd was a good idea. It is, after all, post-TechEd and post-PDC. I understand that there is a football match planned for that day…clearly football schedule planners don’t consult us when they are making their plans! We also stretched the time-frame for DDD7 – we have a time-line that we follow for all DDDs, this one we changed to suit the fact we had time on our hands. We opened session submissions earlier than usual and kept it open for longer – this has had the advantage of attacting new speakers on to the submission list. DDD7 is also the first DDD since DDD2 to have girlgeeks (aka ladies, with the exception of Barry, “he ain’t no lady”) on the agenda – Sarah Blow, Kalen Delaney, Annie Matthewman being the first to hold that honour.

Now that I’ve got some statistics rolling, I’ll publish some more over the coming weeks. For example, there is one speaker who has made it on to the agenda for all seven DDDs…more later!

In the meantime, DDD7, November 22nd 2008, Microsoft Thames Valley Park, Reading – on a Saturday, no cost to attend, bacon rolls, free lunch, swag, registration opens “real soon now”.

Follow DDD on Twitter here.

Technorati Tags: DDD, DDD1, DDD2, DDD3, DDD4, DDD5, DDD6, DDD7, developerdeveloperdeveloper, Microsoft, TVP, Reading

Last night, I discovered that this blog had made in on to Datamation‘s Top 200 Tech Blogs…at position 160. Huge thanks to the folks involved in making that happen!

I’m pleased to be sharing the page with the likes of Joel on Software, Scott Hanselman, Channel 9, John Lam, Jeff Attwood and many others!

Here’s the URL:

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/cnews/article.php/12035_3770056_8

Technorati Tags: Datamation, Tech Blog, James Maguire

In my earlier blog post, I hinted that I had a few more tips’n’tricks that are helping me get on top (and stay on top) of my e-mail.

This one is somewhat simpler than my “move to folder” tip.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll be on a number of mailing lists and online subscriptions. It can be easy to mentally block these out, however even over a short space of time, more than a handful can build up. Rather than touching each one individually, I prefer to be able to group the offending e-mails together.

To help me achieve, this I have a single rule that is capable of identifying where an e-mail comes from – mailing lists and subscriptions are usually pretty consistent with the From: and Subject: fields, so it’s easy to spot words or e-mail addresses that *always* appear in such e-mails. My rule then makes use of an action to set the priority of the e-mail to low. This way I can sort my inbox by priority, whereupon I can deal with the low priority items in one go.

Creating a rule in Microsoft Outlook is fairly straightforward, so I won’t bore you with the precise steps involved. Your starting point is the Tools menu followed by the Rules and Alerts menu option.

I have a Low Priority rule that sets all e-mail from Computer Weekly and Building Magazine have a priority of low. Sorry folks, I do read your e-mails, but I want to be able to file or delete them quickly too!

As such, this results in my inbox looking like this:

As you can see, e-mails from the two parties mentioned in the rule are automatically marked as low priority. Sorting (by clicking on the ! in the header row), filing and deleting are now that bit easier.

Other posts
GTD Action/Deferred/WaitingFor/Someday folders in Microsoft Outlook – Show Item Count
Making e-mail simpler and easier to handle: using Microsoft Outlook rules
Elementary GTD using Microsoft Outlook “move to folder”

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Outlook, Outlook, Rules, Rules and Alerts, low priority, GTD, Getting Things Done

An eagle-eyed reader of this post made me aware of this one:

Winning a laptop is sure to be good – I tried to enter this competition (via the ComputerWeekly web-site) this morning, only to be greeted with a question that I could not answer:

One need only use search engines to discover that a zettabyte and a terabyte are measures of data storage!

And for the sake of completion, a trilobite.

A colleague was trying to use the RBS web-site today. Despite entering all the correct information, where was the Confirm button?

Earlier this month I was lucky enough to make it to the O2 Arena at the same time that Metallica happened to be playing the second gig of their Death Magnetic tour. Huge thanks to Toby Henderson for getting me a ticket. It was a bucket list event for me – that box is ticked now!

We saw

We met, we drank (thanks to Twitter for bringing us together)

Those white dots are camera ‘phones…
…Hetfield told the audience to put their ‘phones away…it’ll never be as good as the live experience. How true. I “do believe” that camera ‘phones should be banned from gigs of this calibre, although it’s very hard to enforce. Taking a handful of photographs is probably alright (as I did), however a lot of folks had their camera ‘phones out and up for the entire gig…such as waste and loss of enjoyment, in my opinion.

We heard
That Was Just Your Life
The End of the Line
Kirk Solo #1
The Thing That Should Not Be
Of Wolf and Man
One
Broken, Beat & Scarred
Cyanide
Frantic
Until It Sleeps
Wherever I May Roam
For Whom The Bell Tolls
Kirk Solo #2
The Day That Never Comes
Master Of Puppets
Blackened
Stone Cold Crazy
Jump in the Fire
Seek and Destroy

Technorati Tags: Metallica, holytshirt, toby henderson