Saturday, August 16, 2008

The Real World: München

A Keynote at W-JAX

I am so filled with the joy of W-JAX '08 that I cannot contain it.

I will be presenting a keynote at the conference in November and I am thrilled. No holds barred. Nothing off limits. It is going to be both fun AND informative.



The First 60 Seconds

I will start my talk with the usual
"I am so happy to be in Münich... The last time I was in Münich was ... blah blah."

You can't go wrong with this intro. Everyone does this bit, including one of my favorites Tim Bray.

Astonishing Tales

Then, I dive right into telling astonishing tales of building commercial software on top of Open Source frameworks.

To give you an idea of how astonishing my tales are, here is a picture taken at EclipseCon 2008 of me telling stories to (from left to right) Ben Pasero (the smartest twenty-something guy I know who does not work at Google - yet), Bernd Kolb, and Martin Aeschlimann (JDT/UI lead and my bestest Swiss friend).



These three guys look mesmerized and I am hoping my talk will have this effect on the 800+ attendees at the conference.

What makes a good keynote?

To me, the best keynotes are ones that meet one or more of the following criteria:
1. they make you laugh
2. they make you cry
3. they make you think

If you have a story about commercial development around Eclipse that meets at least one of the criteria above, I would love to hear it. Please send an email to wassim dot melhem at gmail dot com.

5 comments:

Gabriel, Alizé, Nadine, Jean-Michel said...

Hey, this keynote sounds very similar to http://www.eclipsecon.org/2008/?page=sub/&id=92?

Wassim Melhem said...

Hey JML, I never had the pleasure to attend your talk. I didn't know you gave one. You are one of my favorite speakers.

My talk will focus on the business side of things. I have no plans to discuss UI threads and manifest files :)

Benjamin Pasero said...

Hey Wassim, very cool to see you as keynote speaker for W-JAX :-)! I am sure it will be a big success. Looking forward to seeing you in Munich.

Wassim Melhem said...

Hey Ben,

It will be great to see as always. I still owe you a drink with an umbrella in it (or an item of equal or lesser value :) )

Benjamin Pasero said...

Oh right! Looks like Munich will be the right place for it then :)