Husted Tops Thirty

While in Salt Lake City last week, I dropped by the Utah Java Users Group meeting and gave my 33rd public presentation, my fourth appearance this year. I usually run about six presentations or courses a year. I’m already on the hook for The Ajax Experience (Boston) in October, and ApacheCon (Atlanta) in November, so it’s shaping up to be a busy year.

The UJUG gig was a last-minute thing. I was already in town to present a three day training course, so we dropped by, and the organizer, Chris Maki, setup up a special event for me during the “Break Out” session at the end. It had already been a busy night covering both SunSPOT robots, Java FX, and Java Scripting, but, even so, several stalwart Strutites hung around for the “special guest appearance”. I ran through the better part of my Building Struts 2 Applications session, and answered a number of excellent questions.

I’ve been doing Struts presentations for six years now. The first, in June 2001, was a one-day “train the trainers” gig for an agency in Atlanta. Struts 1.0 was barely out the door, and before they asked, I had never thought of doing onsite Struts consulting. So, I had no slides, and no projector. We just met in a room with a flipchart, and hovered around my laptop for code demonstration, but at the end of the day, everyone there knew a lot more about Struts (including me!).

That sort of thing went on for several years. People would call and ask me to come out and work with their development team. We’d whip up an agenda, and, along the way, I started to build a library of slides, based on the what each team wanted to cover. Many times, we’d refine the agenda as we went, and I’d be creating or refining sessions in my hotel room the night before.

Eventually, I got tired of doing everything on the fly, and developed an actual training course. Being bloody-minded, my Struts University courseware is open source, just like Struts itsef. Right now, there are two tracts for the MailReader Training Course, one for teams new to Struts 2 and another for teams that are migrating from Struts 1. The base course is the same, but I change the initial presentation, as well as how the material is presented.

I’ve given the course several times now, and it seems to be working well. It’s a 50/50 mix of lecture and labs. The labs are designed to build the MailReader example application, use case by use case. We follow Agile principles, so each lab is an iteration that leaves us with a functioning application at the end.

I enjoy holding the courses, but I don’t actually enjoy traveling. I do it, but I don’t like it. Of course, it would be much more convenient if people would come here to Rochester NY. I did do a class here last summer, but it’s hard to know when to set a date. If anyone might be interested in coming to Rochester in December or May, or somewhere in between, let me know. At The Ajax Experience and ApacheCon, I’ll be speaking on Migrating to Ajax, so if that might be of interest as a full course, either here or there, let me know that too.