I attended my first conference two weeks ago, a two-day New Zealand software engineers' teaching and research conference (SIENZ 07) at Auckland University. I believe it went really well.

I had to give a short presentation on my project and our achievements so far. The presentation went well, and I got some really excellent feedback. I discussed briefly the current state of the web, the lack of and the need for web engineering practices, and a short summary of what we have achieved (and how), and our plans for the future.

The feedback I got back included questions on whether web "developers" would actually follow an engineering model, and some tips on limiting the complexity of our final model (especially important since we are essentially condensing entire Web applications -- almost from business logic to DOM scripting -- into a single, concise, transformable and transportable model).

Edit: Paper - Presentation

I also met many of the software engineers from universities around the country, and discussed each others projects, and where we could combine our resources. It was really excellent to be in an environment where everybody knew what you were talking about (roughly speaking) and were actually interested in each others work.

I'm usually really bad with presentations, but determined not to make a complete fool this time, I did some research and I found some really excellent tips on giving important presentations. Basically -- don't worry about it too much. Don't treat it as a speech, treat it as a discussion with colleagues -- and orient it towards the audience. Also, provide the audience with something that they can take away from the presentation. These tips worked really well for me, I felt more relaxed than I had ever felt, and people seemed to be impressed (at least, there weren't many questions at the end!).

The entire conference served as a great introduction into the world of attending such conferences, and was good practice for my much bigger and more important conference in Australia early next year.

(I suppose I should have really called this journal dr-jevon )