It’s not like I can’t find plenty of great presentations here in the US, but, while I was over in Belgium at Techorama I checked out several of the presenters there. They were awesome. This was the first ever Techorama. It’s a developer focused event, but there was stuff there for data-centric people too. They had a great international collection of speakers from all over. The venue was a movie theater which was a lot of fun to present in, although may be a little too comfy to watch presentations (I fell asleep in one, I sure hope I didn’t snore). It was such a great event that I decided to pick my speaker of the month from there. I saw a bunch of very good presentations (even the one I fell asleep to was good, the parts I saw), but one stood out for me, both because of the topic and the presentation of the topic. I’m giving my speaker of the month award to Tiago Pascoal (b|t) of Portugal for his presentation at Techorama, “My Code is Ready, Now What.”
Tiago is a Microsoft MVP for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) from Portugal, or, as he himself put it, “on the ass of Europe.” Pardon the language, but that was funny. I loved watching Tiago present. He was really funny, which was excellent because discussing ALM can be pretty dry. He said several times as he was presenting stuff “I should get a monkey to do this for me.” It was great. I loved the way he discussed things, stating matter of fact things like, regarding code in source control “It’s 2014, everyone is doing this now.” and his ease and manner of just assuming that, of course, the database is treated the same way. I like the way he talked about provisioning, comparing it to pets vs. cattle. Do you want to have to pamper and groom to get a server online, or is it just one more cow in the herd? Great stuff. I also loved how free and easy he was with typing. He demoed in a raw, live manner and got it all to work too. His slides had great pictures that both made his point and were entertaining. I really loved it. His demonstration of Octopus was so smooth I’m actually pretty jealous.
I don’t have much to offer Tiago for improvements. I loved his slides, but the look and feel within them wasn’t completely consistent. Minor nit, but I have to say something. I loved how he typed through the demos instead of having them canned (which I do), but it did sometimes slow down the flow, just a little. Again, minor nit. The presentation was just that good.
I’ve no idea where he’s presenting next. He is on Lanyrd (yay), but doesn’t having anything upcoming. I can heartily recommend going to see him speak.
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