Mark Needham

I did a presentation titled 'Mixing functional and object oriented approaches to programming in C#' at the Developer Developer Developer conference in Reading.

The slides from the talk are below:

I've not done many technical talks so far. My only previous attempt was a talk on F# one at the Sydney Alt.NET user group last year so I'm still learning how to do this effectively.

It was quite interesting reading through some of the feedback from twitter and several people pointed out that the content was too basic which was something I was concerned about while writing the talk:

OK. 30 mins into #ddd8 talk of functional vs OO approaches and I've been told one small thing I didn't know.

#ddd8 finished @markhneedham talk… Good speaker,but but basic For me, the last 20% of the content should have been 80% of the talk

"If you want to learn more…" Er…yeah. I certainly want to learn more than I just did. #ddd8

Mark did a good job but difficulty lvl would help as it was quite basic. Missed caching bit looking at twitter. Doh!

Mark Needham's talk on functional and OO at #DDD8 was OK, but the first 2/3 was too much of a simple intro.

The feedback I got in person was that the talk worked alright and there were a couple more positive comments on twitter too:

Great day at #ddd8 – really enjoyed Mark Needham's functional programming session & testing ASP.Net with Ruby

Listening to @markneedham at #ddd8. He has a fantastic abilty to break things down and explain them

I think there were probably too many slides in the talk – I found myself pausing unnaturally so that I could move to the next slide which was also pointed out on twitter:

In my first session at #ddd8 on functional programming – loadsa slides – someone get the guy a remote!

I think I'll probably go with less slides the next time – some of them weren't adding much value anyway so I don't think it would hurt too much to drop them.

Overall though it was a good experience for me getting the chance to put this talk together and I think I learnt a little more about better ways to understand the way we can use functional programming in C# by having the opportunity to prepare this.