Benjamin’s summary of my “Building Proseware” session at TechEd

Benjamin Mitchell wrote a better summary of my "Building Proseware Inc." session at TechEd Amsterdam than I ever could.

Because ... whenever the lights go on and the mike is open, I somehow automatically switch into an adrenalin-powered auto-pilot mode that luckily works really well and since my sessions take up so much energy and "focus on the moment", I often just don't remember all the things I said once the session is over and I am cooled down. That also explains why I almost never rehearse sessions (meaning: I never ever speak to the slides until I face an audience) except when I have to coordinate with other speakers. Yet, even though most of my sessions are really ad-hoc performances, whenever I repeat a session I usually remember whatever I said last time just at the very moment when the respective topic comes up, so there's an element of routine. It is really strange how that works. That's also why I am really a bad advisor on how to do sessions the right way, because that is a very risky approach. I just write slides that provide me with a list of topics and "illustration helpers" and whatever I say just "happens". 

About Proseware: All the written comments that people submitted after the session have been collected and are being read and it's very well understood that you want to get your hands on the bits as soon as possible. One of my big takeaways from the project is that if you're Microsoft, releasing stuff that is about giving "how-to" guidance is (for more reasons you can imagine) quite a bit more complicated than just putting bits up on a download site. It's being worked on. In the meantime, I'll blog a bit about the patterns I used whenever I can allocate a timeslice.