eRubyCon Slides & Summary

I was at eRubyCon this last week, courtesy of Joe O’Brien and the great folks at EdgeCase who invited me to speak.

This was my first conference outside the .NET arena in years (excluding CodeMash) and I’m kicking myself for not doing this more often. I got some great insights on different ways to solve problems, and I met some amazing folks who inspired me to get to work on fixing a few things in my life that need addressing. I also got fired up about a few neat tools and some changes to our environment at work. (CodeMash is awesome for this, but as an organizer I get little or no time to actually participate in it.)

I gave my Leadership 101 talk as the first session of day 2. This is the second time I’ve given this talk, but it was in a completely different format than the 20 minute talk I gave at KalamazooX. KalX was amazing (and I hope I get invited back there!), but the longer format of eRubyCon gave me a chance to flesh out a few points. I also mixed in some examples from my background to lend some detail and color.

I always feel weird talking to a crowd about leadership because I don’t pretend to be a master of it, but the audience there was wonderful to speak to, and I got some nice feedback.

The slide deck is my usual funky style: 14 slides total, two pictures, one number, and (aside from the opening quote) six words total, three of which are repeats. There are even a couple blank slides just because. The deck’s here and there are some notes on it, but the best resource is really the Leadership 101 blog series that inspired the talk.

eRubyCon has been one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. I’m definitely attending next year regardless of whether or not I’m on the speaking docket. It was an awesome weekend!