Unfortunately I can’t answer this question without discussing this with Giedrius and I was not able to reach him recently.

Well, I guess the best thing to do is to send (or keep sending) emails to me and Giedrius (gzlatkus@gmail.com)… I am sorry for the delay.

I am personally much less involved into the operational marking of your efforts than I was in “architecting” the course (no matter how ad-hoc it looked at the end)…

Once again, thanks very much for your valuable feedback (IMHO it was the first time of such two-way dialogue at MIF), I will try to sum your posts up an respond with some concluding remarks shortly.

Not only feedback I want to thank you for – I was able to get a lot of inspiration from you guys and you (unknowingly) served as a secret weapon in some battles I had recently I used your projects to energize and provoke colleagues of my projects by stating “c’mon fellas, show some pride and enthusiasm, my students from VU MIF can outperform you easily!”. It helped. Still I think some of you would outdo them

I don’t claim to be a presentation guru or the mr. know-it-all. But I did have some damn good presentations in my life, I took part in a few presentation-related courses, read some theory and I used to analyze the way others present ideas and track down the common mistakes that they make.

So what I would like to present here is a list of some most relevant presentation tips that I gathered from my own experience and a variety of other sources. This is not directly SOA-related stuff, but in any business or academic environment a good presenter is priceless. And we all agreed that our presentations last Saturday were not really top notch. So here it goes (and feel free to post your tips and tricks or links in the comments).

1. Prepare and be prepared. This is the rule #1. The public can tell a prepared presenter from a spontaneous speaker in a matter of seconds. And make sure you take into account all aspects of the presentation, including your clothing, appearance, technical means, backup plans in case something does not work, timing, ideas, etc. It’s best to start preparing presentations early ahead of deadline. This leaves more time to rehearse them, look at them with a fresh mind and iteratively perfect them. Start with general questions like “what ideas do I want to convey?” “who is the target audience?” “what is my goal?” Is it to sell something? To explain a concept? To entertain the public and keep them interested? After you know answers to these questions, lay out a plan of the ideas that you will be presenting. I usually use the outline view in Microsoft Word (some people don’t know it exists – try it out, a great feature) or I just open PowerPoint and create empty slides with just the titles.
   After you have the outline, start creating slides, demonstrations and notes. When deciding on the detailness of presentation, try to put yourself into the listeners shoes. What do I know as an observer? Am I familiar with this subject? Would I like someone to explain the basics of the subject or would I like to get the details right away?
   It’s also important and what point is your presentation during an event. People can handle boring presentations better in the morning. On the contrary – presentations after the lunchbreak should really be entertaining or you risk having a bunch of sleeping beauties in front of you
   In any case, never go on the stage unprepared. No, really, never.
2. Rehearse and watch your timing. When you have a presentation ready, just practice it out in an empty room. Do that no matter how odd this seems to you Imagine yourself in front of an audience, say what you want to say, click what you will be clicking. After you finish, check your watch. Did you fit in the time limit? Which part took too long? Did you like the way it all went? If not, modify the presentation and practice again.
3. A picture is worth a thousand words. This is a nice saying, but many many presenters underestimate its importance. I always get bored when someone starts their PowerPoint slide show which has nothing but many long statements prefixed with bullets and displayed on the screen. Some bullets disappear, other ones appear. BOOOORING. The presenter knows the subject/project/topic quite well, usually because he has worked in the field for quite some time. But the spectator might be completely unfamiliar. So use pictures. Use them instead of words or together to strengthen the ideas. For example, instead of having an item “Our product uses a very accurate timing scheme”, put a picture of a clock and say about timing with your voice. It will take a split-second for the audience to understand that you’re talking about time and make an association.
   Even if text is necessary, put picture next to it. This will strengthen the idea and will require less mental effort of the audience to understand the “big picture”.
   But make sure you find the right picture. Abstract, vivid and stylish pictures work best to symbolize a certain concept. Real photos are less appropriate. And even though standard clip art that comes with MS Office is better than nothing, try to avoid it if you want to be seen as professional
   Diagrams and schemes are extremely useful when displaying the structure of some concept or thing, flow of data, etc.
4. A video is worth a thousand pictures. This is just a continuation of the previous idea. It takes time and effort, but if the presentation is really important to you, try to make an animation instead of describing a certain algorithm in text. I love seeing animations of data packets traveling from one server to another and it makes it completely easy to understand what a person is talking about.
5. PowerPoint is good. Usually. Some general tips for PowerPoint presentations, which are almost always used during presentations:
   Don’t use default templates, everyone has them. If you don’t have a template that bears your company’s brand and color scheme or another appropriate one, use black on white. Or white on black. If other colors are used, make sure they contrast well or otherwise they might not be seen on projector screen.
   Don’t have too many slides. As a general rule of thumb,  5 is usually enough, 10 is more than enough and 20 is insane. Plan the number of slides so that it would take about 3 minutes to present a single slide.
   Don’t have too much text on a slide. Learn the text by heart and don’t use the slides as reminders of what to say. It’s best to have maximum 5-9 items of text on a slide. And have them short. Instead of writing “Our software is really fast compared to competitors”, write “High performance” and say the long sentence orally.
   Make the text items appear one by one right before you present them. If all items appear at once, the audience will start reading them all and won’t hear you elaborate on the first ones.
   Don’t use fancy transition effects unless you’re making a presentation at a kindergarten. Simple appearance with some subtle fades is usually the best choice.
6. Keep eye contact. Try to see the whole audience. Don’t focus on a single person, even if it’s Carmen Electra somewhere in the second row. Don’t look over people’s heads or at the ceiling. Look them in the eyes. If you have to look at the screen, do it briefly and then look at people while talking.
7. Watch your posture. Stand straight, keep your hands out of your pockets. Imagine James Bond if that helps you, that’s how you want to be seen. Cool, authoritative and totally in control. Your lower part of the body must not make any unnecessary movement. This is a sign of nervousness and insecurity. So don’t shift your weight from leg to leg, don’t shake your legs when sitting or walk in small steps back and forth. Your upper part of the body is much more free to do whatever it wants. Use hand gestures to create necessary emotions, but don’t bite your nails or scratch your ears.
8. Walk to keep attention. It is really advisory to walk around the stage when presenting. The walk should be slow and controlled, not frantic movement around. Come up to a certain sector of the audience and watch them while talking. This immediately wakes them up. Go up and down the aisle, if it’s a split layout of chairs. Go back to the stage. And always keep eye contact.
9. Use your voice powers. The voice is a really powerful instrument and must be used appropriately during presentations. If you have a weak voice, it’s not a problem. One of the ideas is to look at the back row of the audience and try speaking in such manner that they would hear you. Just tell yourself “I want them to hear me” and your voice will adjust subconciously. Generally try to be loud and clear. Speak slowly enough and articulate words. But the most important tool is your intonation. Try to vary the pitch of your voice from lowest to highest, depending on what you’re saying. Pause often and at unpredicted places. This creates anticipation and tension, which is what you want. Make your voice come from the deepest of your chest, resonate it. And no “emms, ahhs” or repeating annoying words, such as “kind of, like, well”, etc.
10. Dress appropriately. The audience must see you as an authority, not someone on the equal level to them. So as a rule, dress one step better than the audience does. If it’s an informal meeting, put on a shirt and leave your shorts at home. If everyone will be wearing shirts, put on a tie and possibly a suit. If everyone will be wearing suits, make sure yours is not from Maxima and has matching colours and a matching tie. As for the colours, black subconciously makes a person seen as an authority. Lighter colours make you seen as more friendly, simple, down-to-earth guy. If several people will be presenting different parts of the same presentation, make sure they are dressed matchingly.
11. Involve the audience. Make them participate in the presentation. Rhethorical questions are good, but polls are better. For example, ask “how many of you have ever done that?” and raise your hand to show that they’re supposed to do the same. Try to use these questions not only in the beginning or end. And pick questions in a way that many people could answer them without being afraid that it’s too personal.
12. User humor (if you can). If you are able to make an audience laugh (when needed, not when you fart accidentally or your software crashes), you’ll have them love you and not want to sleep at all. Use jokes sparingly and make sure these are tested jokes and will work. Don’t make fun of any social groups that could be present in the audience. It is better to not joke at all than to say a joke and be the only one who’s laughing.
13. Don’t be worried. For some people speacking in front of an audience is an intimidating and scary experience by itself and as soon as they go up on stage, they forget all the tips and tricks. Well, practicing is the best remedy and not much to add here (imagining everyone naked will not probably be too helpful). But when you go on the stage, remember – the audience always wants you to succeed. When people come to an event, they don’t want to be taking part in some kind of failure. They dedicated their time to the show and they want it to be the best it can be. So always have this in mind and make it a good show for them, they’ll love it.
14. Use plenty of examples. Don’t speak only in abstract terms. Add examples to support your ideas. And pick the right examples while preparing. After saying “It’s really important for people to take responsibility for their actions” say “For example, imagine a situation, where you go to a person X and he does Y to you. Would it be right for X to do Z instead? etc.” Don’t be afraid to repeat something you have already said. Say that in other words. Those who missed it the first time will understand it.
15. Maintain the context. When watching a presentation, I always like to put its ideas into a “big picture”. So especially if there are many slides, I like to know which part of the big picture we are discussing. For example, if you are discussing a concept that consists of 4 components, each of which is covered by 2 slides, I would love to see somewhere at the top of the slide the name of the component that we are discussing. Or alternatively, the presenter could say something like ”we have already discussed components 1 and 2, they form the basis of the product and as for the component 3, the main idea is this”.
16. Pay special attention to group presentations. When there are several presenters in the same presentation, a rehearsal is absolutely necessary. Divide everything in such a way that switches between people would be minimal. Don’t interrupt each other as this is a sign of unpreparedness and lack of a single point of view. Dress uniformly and make sure both presenters are worth each other, otherwise the bad presenter will look even worse and the good one will look as someone who chose a loser as a partner.

So, pick the tips that you want to apply in your presentations, see what works for you, watch others present and make notes of what you liked and what you would have done differently. Good luck to everyone in their future presentations – the audience wants you to succeed ;)

Ugnius Keturka

Or not.

At least in some cases most of the buisiness use-cases .

Why? I’ll tell (or rather write) you why… Maby I’m pesimistic, but yet, its my view and thank God im not in Russia so I can elaborate on this topic.

The idea struck me after reading Jelenas post about mash up of our projects. Its basically a flood of information for the end user and on a side note – a lucky case of possitive flood. They say its nice, becouse you can create. Yes, I agree. But then again – I want to be very strict in the sense, that if you create something, and it is not art – then it must be usable AND usefull. And created.

I’m leaning towards this: mash-it-up is ok in several cases, like: “I like it”, “I like to explore”, “I’d like to make a proof of concept”. And on the contrary – if you have to work with”mashed-up” things – you get a pain in … you head.When the free map will display the locations of “easy-going-girsl” next to the location where you invite your business partners, what then? If you life depends on the map – what do you choose: shiny MapPoint WS or standalone MapPoint application providing the same functionality? If my words don’t sound true to you – check it. Map point is sold as a standalone application, although you can get all of it online. Why? Becouse using WS’es is not good enought, although its beutifull. And if you STILL don think so – remember our presentations, some services failed us…

I dont know of a way to effectively control risks using SOA and there are defined methods to control risks in the case of usual applications. That is the main reason, why most business’es will stick to traditional applications, and partially ignore SOA island as a whole. Its like lego – easy to create very functional stuff from basic components (shiny, breath taking feature), but if you use lego to create stable platform for you HDD inside your PC box – well… lets just hope it wont crash and break some cable connector on our motherboard (as I AM hoping right now )

I dont think i said something new, but the question must be asked: how do you guarantee, that it will work after 5 years? Will you pay me, if it fails and I will have to remake it? Standalone apps WILL work until new generation of Windows(c) break (with a little “if”) them And its more likely, that hardware will break those apps, whereas considering WS – HW is not the main enemy.

Thus i just want to stress it – building on a shoulder of giant is not enought to make the house stand. The giant may move and you wont be able to stop it. It’s a giant after all.

How to control risk of using SOA? Why choose bigger risk, when all i need is a stable performance? Which cost is lower and why do you think so (the cost of WHOLE project, which achieves the same result): the SOA and the risk it brings or the more-or-less risk-free standalone app?

I encourage you to answer my question in the comments and you can try to change my oppinion.

Two reasons to do that:

• I like soa (LEGO was THE toy when i was a kid) , and I would like to hear your answers, so i can like and understand it even more.
• Most likely comments will be seen as an active participation in the blog

P.S. Talking about the people, who are afraid of gay meetings in public places, heres an idea:

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
Benjamin Franklin

The main idea is to collect fuel prices from the web and present it as a web service which could serve clients with the cheapest fuel prices (expressed in any currency) and other useful methods. Other details you’ll find in our wiki, which, let be honest, is not yet absolutely finished…

Actually, project is practically done, but you can’t yet access front-end (web user interface) because everything is hosted on my private Ubuntu server and we have some problems deploying .NET web service (.NET + unix = headache). If everything continues like this we will be forced to demonstrate our system on localhost during the Saturdays lecture But this is not a problem. Despite this, you can test user interface of our first WS (it is written in Ruby and successfully deployed on Unix) , which is responsible for manual adding of fuel prices (Ruby + Unix = muscle).

Updated: now you can access beta web user interface (it is yet being polished) and documentation following www.strikeiron.com

Greetings from Vienna (airport only…), on the way back from Thessaloniki & Meteora.

We are called ElbO.

Our goal is to combine weather forecast, driving directions and location map services into one easy to use place. It is described in greater detail here.

Should you have any questions or some more specific info – I’m your man, contact me at kazimieras.pociunas eta gmail.com.

Thats pretty much it and it MEGA-hurtz to me, that i could not participate in the lecture-conference last Saturday, but family business tend to win in this kind of “contests” . I hope you all really enjoyed it and that the main conclusion of postmortem discussion (if there was any?) was “we want/need more!”

As planned, Jonathan and Diana are in town and will join us tomorrow.

Jonathan offered me a fruit dessert – we’ve had a dinner, I am keen to let you know that he will bring more of that treat tomorrow morning

See ya.

The tentative topics (to be freely interpreted by the speakers and influenced by the audience):

• Business software and software business in London and beyond – corporate and personal views from The Square Mile (with SOA in the backdrop at all times).
• Web services on Rails – Building Web services application with Ruby on Rails. I chose an appetizer for this session… Amazon S3 is very SOA

The speakers are:

• Jonathan Briggs – Strategy Director, the OTHER media & Professor, Kingston University London
• Diana Svirskiene – Project & QA Manager, Merrill Lynch UK and beyond (previously BNP Paribas UK and Thoughtworks UK)
• Justas “The Chaser” Janauskas – Chief ERP Software Architect at Alna Business Solutions and a master-level computer science student here at Vilnius University, MIF

Working language of the session language will be English.

We will use the VU MIF channels to make this information available to a broader audience, please feel free to invite people who might be interested.

Justas has volunteered to shed some light on the WS on Rails next time. I think this is great, I just need to work out the packed schedule of the next seminar.

Now it is time for you to think about the implementations of your first prototypes (those who haven’t thought through your business ideas and solution concepts are urged to do that pronto – next Saturday, the 28th of April is the last date to present your project ideas).

One of the first questions I was facing myself when trying to get some WS solution to work was the followig: where do I start from? Do I code in Java (C#…) my classes first and then generate WSDL or do I produce WSDL and then derive classes? That’s not an easy one, I must say.

Of course, many more bright heads were having the same problem for a while, therefore you will be able to google for an advice or two. Here is one link to start with -
Contract-First or Code-First Design (thanks to Jelena for suggesting this). I hope you will find the discussion fut to read, as I did

When it comes to the practical end, there are some guys who firmly believe in code-first approach and they came up with a product, which helps to enunciate your services. I hope the tool is as good as some claims about it.

OK, this was a short post, hope it will help in some ways. Wish me luck in Brussels on Wednesday

And one more link – take a journey through shared services – experience of BEA Systems in the city of Chicago… I was listening for this presentation on Wednesday in London and found it interesting.

All the best.

There is some good news for May – two interesting and knowledgeable persons will most likely join us on 12th of May for a session “Business software and software business in London and beyond – corporate and personal views from The Square Mile”. The speakers are:

• Jonathan Briggs – Strategy Director, the OTHER media & Professor, Kingston University London
• Diana Svirskiene – Project & QA Manager, Merrill Lynch UK and beyond (previously BNP Paribas UK and Thoughtworks UK)

I am very glad that Jonathan and Diana promised to find time and spend few hours with us.

Diana will be between the trips to Merrill Lynch offices in New York and Hong Kong where she will be coordinating global deployment of an investment banking solution, while Jonathan is always on the move somewhere Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope their plans will not change.

Please book your calendars.

Myself, I will be with you this upcoming Saturday and the next one as well. There is a catch however – I need to hop between the flights in Nice this morning (in a few hours, in fact) – my BA flight from London is due to land at 9:45 in Nice and my LH flight to Frankfurt-Vilnius is scheduled for 11:00. So… I printed my boarding cards “at home” and just hope that there will be no delays at London Gatwick and I will do the trick. Otherwise… well, otherwise I will come on Friday to join you on Saturday

I was privileged to attend a round-table discussion dinner with top-tier UK Government IT architects last evening for an interesting discussion about the role of SOA in Transformational Government. The event (organized by BEA Systems) was interesting, will share some thoughts with you. The things I heard there will also help me to defend the ground of the R4eGov project at the review meeting in Brussels next week.

Best regards, still from my beloved London, en route {Nice-London-Nice-Vilnius-Brussels-Vilnius-(kayak daytrip, Ula river)-Nice}

Gotta pack and catch my red-eye flight.

Anyway, we have got two months to kill (2 more Saturdays booked – 21st and 28th of April, mark your diaries) and two more are in the pipeline (tentatively) for May. However we must also think about the prizes (exam marks) and we want to make the process of getting them enjoyable, don’t we?

So… in the spirit of this course where we try to turn many tables around, we wanted to discuss the ideas how YOU get marked with YOU And we did so, as the picture testifies:

Now, what’s this? Well, this is the blueprint of the contract – our common agreement about what we think is fair when it comes to showing your capacity & skills.

For full clarity and especially for those who were not with us, let me translate (again, this will need to be discussed/approved):

The exam mark will consist of:

• A reward for attendance – 2 points
• A reward for activity – posts/comments – 1 point. Blasting me for wearing the FR football scarf may very well set you back by minus 2 points I may wear the LT scarf in Nantes – come and join me
• A reward for a team project – 5 points
• A reward for making a presentation – 2 points

The project reward consists of:

• Soundness of the business vision -1 point
• Excellence of conceptual and technical architecture – 1.5 points
• Completeness of implementation – 1.5 point
• Overall marketable value: look and feel, description etc. – think in www.strikeiron.com way about your service – 1 point

In addition:

• Excellence of the project “process” site, such as project wiki – 4 points to share between the team members – you will decide yourself how you will split that
• Peers’ praise – i.e. if other teams think your project is cool, they can award other teams giving maximum 4 points for a single team (out of 6 points total “team prize fund”, which each team is given to show their appreciation of others’ work). No team cannot use the prize fund to award themselves of course.

And more:

• Within a team, it is possible to give up to 3 points voluntarily if someone feels he or she was slacking and was getting a free ride by the rest of the team. And vice versa – a “troika” (three members voting unanimously) have the powers to strip the fourth member by 3 points maximum if the latter will have underperformed yet thinks “well, no big deal…”.

The idea of the project is to think of some added value, which can be sold to some customers by providing them with a service (simple or aggregated/composite), which takes some data/functionality from somewhere and presents it in an SOA way (WS/SOAP or REST) in a clean and marketable way. Let me repeat – there must be a realistic business-value component involved in your solution. The more real – the better.

You are free to choose the platform + tools, as long as they adhere to the WS/REST standards.

Each project needs to be implemented by a team of 4 people, please team-up and set up a point of contact (blog, wiki etc) to make the project transparent. Make sure you will be using social software to communicate – this is NOT optional. Please be quick to avoid being left behind and work in an incomplete team, which will mean less fun and more work for you. Unless you are a die-hard individualist, of course, but then you will face some problems anyway.

Additional rule: if someone is left behind to work alone (imagine that we have 29 people) then the last full team to register will need to ask someone from their ranks to volunteer and join the poor lone soul Translation: be quick to team up.

There is also a “qualifying prerequisite” (or the final seal, if you want) to be eligible for the mark:You will need to write a thoughtful post, which would shed some light on your thoughts about:

• What is the added value (if any) of attending this course for you, as a future software systems architect (please maintain this longer-term perspective)?
• What is the immediate benefit for you (if any) in your current professional situation?
• How do you see SOA being helpful in your professional environment? Please elaborate what would you suggest if you would become the chief systems architect of your company for a day.
• How do you see SOA in 5 years from now? Please take both the “local” (LT) perspective and global one.
• What are the pros and cons of “totally online” computing? Think of the Yahoo Pipes – you basically depend totally on the connections.
• How would you use Web 2.0 in a commercial projects? Web 2.0 is, in short: social computing + data mash-ups + rich interfaces.
• How would have you organized this course if given a chance? Please think both from the contents and the form perspective.
• What the lecturers were good at?
• What the lecturers did wrong?
• What topics would you want to include into the remaining sessions?

Please address these points and feel free to add anything you would think YOUR PEERS (and the lecturers) would enjoy reading. The last point is not only for the final “essay” but also for now – we got some seminars ahead of us, as you know. Do shape them!

So you need to register at www.edublogs.org and then ask me, Justinas or Jelena to enable you at soamif.edublofs.org as Authors.

I hope this makes sense, your comments are welcome.

My pleasure was to meet you all earlier today, have a nice Sunday and Easter holidays thereafter.

Here is what I thought would make sense to do on Saturday:

• Firstly, we listen (and I am sure will jump into discussion) what Jelena has to say about SOA in GIS world. I had a chance to get an early preview of the presentation and it is interesting, I think. This sounds like an incentive to come and join us early
• Secondly, I think the previous lecture naturally set up the scene for the talk I planned anyway – “Advanced Web services Architecture”. I think we’ve had enough to realise that SOA/WS is not a toy anymore, it enters corporate IT systems world, therefore it needs corporate muscle. This is what advanced WS architecture is all about. On the other hand we have discussed some architectural/technical stuff, this complements the vision yet we need to tie the loose ends to have the complete picture. So I will try to explain the architecture. I am sure this will turn into a good discussion too.
• Well, I think I better don’t plan anything major in addition to that. There will always be impromptu topics and that’s great, that’s why we value, encourage and stop just short of begging for your active participation

See you all there!

P.S. I almost forgot – we will need to meet in the room #302, as there will be ~450 kids (moksleiviai jaunieji matematikai ) in the house on Saturday. I am not sure they are ripe enough for SOA talks quite yet