Teaching GLORP with Squeak at PDXPUG Day
Sunday, I spoke at the pre-OSCON Portland Oregon PostgreSQL Users Group (PDXPUG) DAY mini-conference about how to connect Squeak to Postgres using GLORP. I had originally pitched the talk with about 45 minutes or so of material in my head. When I got the final schedule, my time had been cut back to 20 minutes (and the coordinator wanted half of that to be "introduction to Smalltalk"), so I realized I could really only do a simple demo. Of course, I was working hard on my materials for my 3-hour OSCON tutorial the following day, so I waited until Sunday morning to actually start writing my PDXPUG talk.
I created the classic BlogPost and BlogComment tables a little bit at a time during my testing. I also set up a Workspace with a series of Do-Its and Print-Its that I knew I could simply run down and fire off to show what was happening. Once I had finished that, I created another workspace that showed a series of Print-Its to show off the basic Smalltalk syntax. I then resized my image to fit into the 1024x768 projector size, and saved it, and waited.
Well, it turns out that lunch ran an hour late, and since my talk was in the afternoon, they asked me to shorten it up a bit. In 5 minutes, I quickly ran through all of my Smalltalk Print-Its. In another few minutes, I showed off the table definitions and object descriptions of my GLORP system, and then I ran through all of the Do-Its and Print-Its of my GLORP demo. Total time: about 12 minutes.
When I sat down (without time for questions), I was sure that it had been a waste of everyone's time. But much to my surprise, the coordinators came over and said "great job", and one-by-one as the afternoon progressed, many of the attendees came up to me asking specific questions that definitely related to my presentation.
So, don't be dismayed if you get only five or ten minutes on a longer agenda somewhere. Squeeze in some Smalltalk. There's always room.
