Content

Dag König, Microsoft, kicked off the day, delivering two great presentations. The first session was Introducing Windows Azure followed by Demonstration of Windows Azure. Together, both of the sessions delivered excellent content for anyone new to Azure. You can download Dag’s slides here.

Next up was Robert Folkesson, Microsoft. Robert delivered a more advanced session about Azure Best Practices. We learned about poisonous message handling, dynamically adding functionality to a worker role, idempotency and much more. You can find Robert’s slides here.

After lunch Henrik Feldt, Jayway, continued with a session on Azure AppFabric ServiceBus. Henrik gave a deep technical presentation where he demonstrated the ServiceBus and encouraged discussion. Henrik’s slides can be downloaded here.

Then it was my turn. I gave a session titled Examples from real life. I gave some examples on how to best utilize your workers and how we design them so that we easily can add more functionality without adding to the cost. I also spoke about continuous integration and lessons learned. You can download my presentation here.

Thank you

Thanks to all of you that attended and helped making this a great event! I hope that we can do this again sometime in the future.

Like most people that has been up on stage a couple of times I'm used to talking for somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes. The longest session I've held was at Linköping University where I talked for 3 hours... Now I'm going to talk for 3 minutes, and to quote the people at TED:

"The 3-minute time limit will be strictly enforced -- it's a limit, not a goal."

And they are not kidding! They literally have a clock ticking down and they literally cut you off if you go over. And I have 3 minutes.

So, how do you prepare? Well, meticulous, of course. But how much time do you need to prepare it? Hard to say, but there are actually some hints here and there about that. Among the most interesting I found this:

"Woodrow Wilson was once asked how long it would take him to prepare for a 10 minute speech. He replied "Two weeks". He was then asked how long it would take for a 1 hour speech. "One week", he replied. 2 hour speech? "I'm ready right now," he replied."

This gives us something to aim for:
* It takes 0 days to prepare a 120 minutes speech
* It takes 7 days to prepare a 60 minute speech
* It takes 14 days to prepare a 10 minute speech.

Now we can plot this on a curve like this:

As you might see this is not a linear dependency, meaning that we have to play around a bit. After a minute of that we get this:

This curve is a pretty decent approximation of Woodrows need for speech preparation. It says that in one week he actually could present for 64 minutes, but Woodrow was probably simplifying things when he said one hour in one week. These findings are of course objective and universal. The length of the talk has an deceleration that increases by 2.1% for each day of preparation needed. The last mark is the 10 minute speech. When go beyond that and zoom in we'll see the following:

The questions in the beginning of this post was how to prepare for a 3 minute talk. Based on the chart above we now know that the answer: meticulously, for 17 days!

(On a side note we also know that it takes 21 days to prepare a 21 second speech, and about 25 day for a hefty 1,5 second speech.)