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This weekend, I did something very, very strange...I gave a talk at C4.

What was strange wasn't the giving a talk at a conference. That I've done a few times. Well, more than a few time. It was more that I, an IT manager was giving a talk to a crowd that is as un-IT as can be: Indie Developers. By and large, this is not a group that is particularly IT-Aware. That's not a good nor a bad thing mind you. It just is. There's a variety of reasons for this, none of which I'll go into here.

First off, thank you very much Wolf, for giving me a chance to speak and a completely open topic. It was...interesting trying to come up with something for this group, and it was something I spent quite a bit of time pondering about. But, based on past experience, the idea was fairly obvious, especially for a group that in general, is very personally invested in their work: Dealing with people who are...shall we say...harshing on them online. (There was a certain amount of amusing coincidence in me picking that topic, as it turned out.)

The talk seemed to be well-received. Then again, zooming pictures of angry badgers are funny.

But, to be honest, I was never quite...comfortable here, outside of 1:1 conversations with people, especially Mike Lee. Warning to all...if you get former aircraft maintenance people swapping stories, that shit can go on for days. But it was a lot of fun, I don't often run into people with whom I can really share that part of my life with, who can really understand the rough humor of it. Any chance I get, I'm buying Mike a few beers.

The thing is, it wasn't that anyone was hostile to me, or anything like that. But, just like an anthropologist living amongst the members of a strange, new tribe doesn't really have a lot in common with the people of that tribe, well, an IT guy doesn't have a lot in common with indie developers. That's not a bad thing, it's just reality. I'm not creating something wonderful, I'm trying to keep shit working, now, and in the future. The way I approach things is really quite foreign to a lot of these folks, and vice-versa. As I told Jason Snell and Dan Moren from Macworld: "I feel like an anthropologist". Everyone was great, but there's just a level of separation that was always there, and so I was never going to really be a part of things.

Aside from the background differences, there was a certain...constant to conversations that comes from acquiring a certain amount of notoriety. Sometimes it was verbalized, other times it was the expressions of "My GOD! He can hold a normal conversation!" Pro Tip folks: you can read this blog from front to back, and you still won't know me, just certain, specific slices of me. That's true of any website/blog. Not to use Mike Lee as Example Man, but even though I read his site whenever he posts new stuff on it, I learned more about him as a person in a few hours of real-world conversation than years of reading his web site could ever tell me. Just because you read words doesn't mean you know the person.

But, my...rep is what it is, and so even though it can be a bit of an obstacle. For example, I do believe I'm the first, and probably only C4 speaker to be told on the twitter backchannel I was boring because I wasn't being a big enough asshole "off the bat". Um...okay, and as we'll see, unintentional irony. (Also, if you're going to talk shit about someone, then man the fuck up and don't pull a lamer backpedal that doesn't even make sense when you get busted on it. You were badass enough to say it, be badass enough to own it. If you realize what you said was wrong, then man the fuck up and apologize and admit you made a mistake.) I heard some variants on that from others in person, albeit more of the "dude, you didn't cuss at all" variety. Time and place folks. I tend not to cuss when I present. Unless I'm presenting in a bar.

So, even though I did have a good time, there was always this sense of separation from things, like I was always observing as much as anything else. (Not that I wasn't having fun with people. Especially damned near scaring Dan Pasco into a new pair of shorts. Saying BOOGABOOGABOOGA to someone really into their iPhone GPS while they're walking down the street? Funny.as.shit.)

So there was always this surreal feeling to things. Fun, but surreal. On the other hand, I got to walk around a city I hadn't really been in since I was....well in over 30 years. Got to see some things I only vaguely remembered. That was way cool.

Oh, and 'the thing'. So there was one talk that was...hmm...you ever been at a presentation, and you can just tell the person doing it is just not into it, not fully engaged, the thing they're talking about is cool, but has some real issues, and they just never figure out how to get the audience into it?

Yeah, one talk went like that. It was good..but not...good.

The backchannel on the guy was...not uniformly supportive. A few people have called it harsh, mean, what have you. Honestly, it was the best example of the difference between my world and the normal C4 attendees' world. (Go to the C4 twitter page, and start about here. ) The basic concept of the talk, about using Appcelerator Titanium to build applications on multiple devices with multiple languages is cool...in theory. The problem was...the talk that was given wasn't the talk that was needed. To be fair, the speaker's wife is ready to have their first(?) child, and you could tell, even if you didn't know this, that he was distracted. The energy was wrong, the presentation was a bit too...not targeted well. It was just a set of issues that while would not have been bad separately...all at once...the backchannel was not terribly supportive.

Some "Pro" tips here, for both the Appcelerator guy, and really, anyone speaking at a highly focused conference:

1. Do not, under any circumstances, speak to people who have spent a not-small amount of money to be in that room, and not be committed, fully, to that moment. If you have a major life-changing event about to happen, and you cannot set that aside for an hour, then do yourself, and everyone else a favor: either ask someone else to present for you, or bow out. I can admire the guy for soldiering on, but he did the audience, and more importantly, he did himself a disservice by not being brutally honest and saying "I can't really do this right, I need to not do this, not this time. Next time, sure. But this time, my head is in the wrong place, and I need to be where my head is at, and this week, it ain't in a hotel conference room." I don't think anyone would have thought ill of the guy for calling in a sub, or bowing out. I know I wouldn't have. When you aren't brutally honest with yourself, you find that others will fill that need.


2. Know your audience. I knew that what I was speaking on had direct applicability, because pretty much everyone in the room had, at some point, had to deal with someone being really pissed at them. Titanium is cool, but it wasn't shown as something that a room full of Objective-C wizards would find useful. It kind of was a bit of a muddle of "You can use every scripting language known to target three mobile platforms and the Mac, and that's cool." Well, yes, it is cool, but so's ice cream. Even as someone who thinks about such things from the POV of "yeah, my devs could use that, it would be useful", I never really saw where I'd want to recommend it. The fact that the answer to "how do we debug a titanium application written in 4 languages in the same project" was, essentially, "yeeeaaaaahhhh...we haven't figured that out yet" was a bad sign. If you're going talk about something that covers a rather immensely large area, instead of bouncing between feature bullets, point out specific things that will make thing better for an indie Mac dev. If you aren't sure what your audience cares about, ask before the conference starts. Talking about products outside of a comfort zone is good. Doing it in a way that makes people dismiss your product is not good.


3. We want to know why your product is good based on your product being good, not because it's not <product>. The fact that Titanium is not Adobe Air is not a reason to use Titanium. Not being the other guy doesn't get you a win. Screw the competition, tell us why, show us why your stuff rocks. A couple of focused demos would have done more to explain titanium than any number of bullet poins.


4. Don't be afraid to break the presentation rules. Just because it's a presentation, you don't have to use presentation software. Honestly, spending 40 minutes showing a decent little application written in difference languages, and then targeting each language's version of that application to three mobile platforms and the Mac would have done so much more to show why we should care about Titanium than slide after slide of trying to talk you through a concept that everyone in the room understood, but wasn't supportive of.

Wolf was pissed about it. I don't think he was, as one person says, between rage and tears, but he was unhappy. I get that. You work hard to put together a good conference, you have a speaker flame out for whatever reason, and the audience is less than perfectly supportive of them. That sucks, and it sticks in your craw, because it's counter to what you see the people at the conference as.

Another pro tip: People, even indie Mac developers, are people. They are going to not always act the way you want them to. However, if you are going to run a backchannel, then for the love of dog, monitor it. When you see it going bad, don't just sit there and get angry. Get up and throw the guy a lifeline. Step in a bit, and give the guy a leg up. Ask him the questions that will help him get back on track, or get on track in the first place. There were a few opportunities where that could have happened, but they didn't. Usually, once people start digging themselves into a hole, they may try to dig themselves out, but digging never fills in the hole, it just makes it deeper. That's a hard judgement call to make, and I know that Wolf, at the time, thought he was making the right call, or even didn't really realize that this talk was not doing as well as it should have. It's not easy to say "time to pull his ass in out of the wind", because it's like relieving a pitcher. There's no way to do it without someone feeling bad.

As well, if you're going to say something about what you felt was bad audience behavior, especially when you're in charge...always, always, always do it from a point of calmness. There are time when anger is appropriate, but if you're going to be basically dressing down a group of people, you need to be calm, and you need to not do it in a way that involves ultimatums. Even when well-intentioned, ultimatums are a bad idea, especially if that wasn't your intent. And if you're going to do it in defense of one speaker, then do it in defense of all of them.

Because when you don't, you send another message: "It was okay to make a rude comment or two about this guy, but not that guy". Speaking as this guy, that kind of sucks. No, being told that I'm not being a big enough asshole, and because I'm not, I'm boring, is not going to offend or hurt me. You don't get to be me without realizing that there are certain rules that ignore you. But, if you're going to scold about fair play and decency, then don't be leaving people out, just because "oh, it won't bother him." It may not, but that doesn't mean they won't notice it.

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