Back from OneDayTalk

[ I should have already written this a bit earlier, but I had some trouble with my left knee and had to go through some surgery (which went well). ]

As in the previous years I have been invited to give a talk at the OneDayConference in Munich. This year it was in a new location in a suburb of Munich called Germering. Getting there was easy for me, as there is a S-Bahn stop almost in front of the conference location.

The new location featured more and larger rooms and especially an area to sit down between talks or during lunch time. As in the last years the conference featured three parallel tracks.

As I said before I like that conference as everything is like a big family event with the organizers and also the presenters which featured many JBoss Colleagues; while I wrote that Ray would be there, Andrew Rubinger replaced him. The only talk that I really attended was the Wildfly one from Harald Pehl, which was full house. In the remaining part of the conference I talked to various attendees and colleagues from Jan Wildeboer to Gavin King and Heiko Braun. Heiko gave me an introduction about his (and Harald's) work to generate UIs from descriptors (which they use in the Wildfly console), which looks very interesting and where I think we could use some of that inside of RHQ to create "wizards" for several types of target resources.

In my talk, which was in the last slot, I had around 30 attendees (which was around 1/3 of the attendees still present). To my surprise I found out that the large majority did not yet know or use RHQ, so I had to switch from my original agenda and gave a brief introduction into RHQ first. Next I talked about the recent changes in RHQ and tried to gather feedback for future use case, but that was of course harder with attendees not knowing too much about RHQ. So much for "know your audience".

How do others try to find out their audience when the only thing they know is "This conference is all about JBoss projects" ?

You can find my slides in AsciiDoc format on GitHub that you can render via AsciiDoctor to html presentation.

Beware of the empty tag

I started playing with AngularJS lately and made some progress with RHQ as backend data source (via the REST api). Now I wanted to write a custom directive and use it like this:

    <rhq-resource-picker/>
    <div id="graph" style="padding: 10px"></div>

Now the very odd thing (for me) was that in the DOM this looked like this:

    <rhq-resource-picker>
       <div id="graph" style="padding: 10px"></div>
    </rhq-resource-picker>

My custom directive wrapped around the <div> tag.

To fix this I had to turn my tag in a series of opening and closing tags instead of the empty one:

    <rhq-resource-picker></rhq-resource-picker>
    <div id="graph" style="padding: 10px"></div>

And in fact it turns out that a few more tags like the popular <div> tag show the same property of not allowing to write an empty tag, but requiring a tag pair.