On Tuesday (2/2/2010) I participated in the Denver Open Source User Group’s first Ignite night. My presentation was an quick overview of Solr, the java based open-source search engine. This was my first Ignite style presentation, and the format is challenging! The presentations were each 5 minutes with a 20 slide deck auto advancing every 15 seconds. I stumbled a bit out of the gate with the cold start but was able to get it back on the rails though I felt as if I was trying to dig myself out of quicksand through the rest of it. Overall it was a lot of fun.
The room was packed, somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 people, and overall the quality of the presentations were very good. You can check out the slide decks on Slideshare here. Here are my slides:
And here is a dry-run of my presentation I recorded while practicing the day of:
