Spletne Urice #106, Ljubljana, Slovenia

At BarCamp Zagreb 2009 after my Watir talk Jure Cuhalev asked me if I will present Watir it in Ljubljana (Slovenia) at Spletne Urice, weekly gathering of Slovenian geeks held in Kiberpipa. Of course, I said: "Yes!".

Slovenian and Croatian (my mother tongue) are similar, but not similar enough to understand each other, so the talk was in English.

About ten people arrived for the talk, as I expected, but it was a bit more formal that I expected. They pointed reflectors at me, gave me a microphone and said they are recording audio and video, and that there is live video stream. In about a week there should be video file of my talk on their site. As I understood, they also prefer to ask questions at the end of the talk, but I prefer when questions are asked during the talk. It makes it more dynamic. I do not think that the purpose of a talk is to show all slides and say what I prepared, but to answer people's questions, even if it moved the talk in the direction I did not plan it to go.

I talked a bit about Watir first, and then about Taza, as an example of Watir framework. I chose Taza among other frameworks simply because it had the best documentation.

As I like to do it, most of my talk was live coding. I would like to thank Marko Mrdjenovič for holding the microphone while I was coding. My live coding went pretty well while I was in pure Watir, but when I switched to Taza (I am not really familiar with it) I had some problems. With some luck and help from the audience, I was able to get to the end of my Taza example.

After the talk, I took a look (and a few pictures) at their museum of old computers. Most of them are functional and powered up, as you can see from the pictures. They even have my first computer, Sinclair ZX Spectrum. If you looked really closely, you would see a tear in my eye while I was looking at it. I spent a lot of time playing with it (while I was a kid, not in the museum).

After the museum I joined the rest of the people in a bar where they were drinking beer, but I had to drink tea, because I had to drive for almost two hours to get home. We had a nice but short chat, because it was getting late and I had to head home.

Slides are available.

For my reference, these are links to Spletne Urice #106 at Spletne Urice and Kiberpipa sites.

Update: audio and video of my talk now available at kiberpipa.org.