I spoke last Thursday at the Java Forum Stuttgart. This is a show that I really enjoy attending; the organization is great, the people are very nice, and Stuttgart is a nice city. I delivered two talks: one on Eclipse RCP and one on Mylyn. The RCP talk went well as usual. The room was filled to capacity (more than 100 people), there were several very good questions, and I believe that most people got what they were looking for. I don’t like admitting this, but there were at least a couple of people who I noticed close their eyes during the talk. That’s okay, I’ve been known to nod off myself once in a while.
Nothing of the sort happened in the Mylyn talk that followed (for those of you who haven’t heard, Mylyn is the new name for Mylar). I started the presentation with some slides liberated from Mik Kersten and Rob Elves’ EclipseCon 2007 talk. I changed the structure of the talk a little and added a few extra slides and bullets (and changed occurrences of “Mylar” with “Mylyn”). It’s a good talk, but I decided to change the flow and rather than do a bunch of demos woven through the presentation (like Mik and Rob do), I opted to do all the talking followed by all the demo’ing.
During the slide presentation, I felt like I was explaining a trick that I had seen a magician do the night before. Mylyn sounds fantastic, but I could sense cynicism in the crowd. How could it possibly be that good, I could sense people thinking. They were actually sitting on the edge of their seats. Nobody nodded off. Everybody was hanging on my every word. It was, in a word, awesome. Then I did the demo and watched the cynicism wash away from their faces. I could feel the wave of energy and excitement. I had a similar experience discussing Mylyn at the JUGC “Unshootout”. Mylyn changes the way that you write code. Mylyn is awesome.
So my new reason to love Mylyn is that as well as being incredibly useful, it demos well. Really well. Mylyn makes me feel like a rock star.
On a side note, among 120-ish or so German-speakers in the audience during my talk, not one of them seemed to know the German word for “collaboration”. Ralph seems to think that it’s because Germans don’t need a word for something that they just do naturally (along the same lines as why we call it “hockey” and not “ice hockey” like much of the rest of the world, I suppose).
