developerWorks: You're listening to developerWorks interviews, where we feature conversations with technical luminaries and thought leaders from a variety of disciplines on topics of interest to technology professionals. I'm your host, Scott Laningham. Our guests today are two software developers and presenters with the Developer Skills Program for developerWorks. These guys work all over the world on developerWorks Live! briefings, and they've taken a break from some new presenter training going on here in Austin to talk with me about these cool events. Well, why don't we start by you guys introducing yourselves and telling me what you do?

Farrell: I'm Willie Farrell, I'm with the Developer Skills Program as part of IBM developerWorks. I'm a software engineer. And one of the things that I do is go around the country, and my team goes around the world, delivering briefings. We call them the developerWorks Live! technical briefings that cover the products that IBM has for software developers and software testing.

developerWorks: Seems like a fun job.

Farrell: It's a great job. It's a really good job. You know, we started these a few years back. We just had actually started with one we did on Web services when it was a real brand new thing, and we had a briefing that we did on it. And we went around, we went to conferences, and we went to different places. And we got this great response. People were like, "Wow -- I spent a half a day, and I learned so much. And it made me want to go learn even more, but I knew where to start because very often you go, I'm interested in that. Where the heck do I go to start?"

Well, by going to the briefing, they can get the information that they need to say, "Oh -- I have a background in it now. And now I can go find out more." Because that's one of the things that we really do on the briefing. You know, it's a half a day, and we might talk about some product line that we have, and we can't cover it in great, great detail. But we hit the highlights, and we let them know these are capabilities that are there. And we do a lot of live demos, and the developers love that because if you just show them slides, after a while they just kind of nod off. So you show them the slides and you talk about, "Now let me show it to you." And you pull it up, and you show them the tool in action. And they're like, "Wow -- that's great. Oh, I need to do that. Where can I find out more?" I can tell you where to find out more. And that's what we do. So we can give them a taste, they get a background. They walk away going, "Now I know how I can go learn more about this. What are the things that this software does, and is it for me? And if it is, how I can find out more about it?"

developerWorks: Fantastic. Now, before we dig even deeper, who are you?

Miller: Well, I'm Jeff Miller, and I'm on the same team that Willie's on. And I do basically the same thing. I also go out of the country a lot, and that's fascinating because it's an opportunity to see the world as well as impart wisdom about IBM's software products.

developerWorks: Hearing what you've already said about them (developerWorks Live! briefings), tell me how they're different and the purpose of them beyond just the tutorials and the things on the Web site.

Miller: We have a number of briefings on a variety of subjects. Some of them are product-related; they're all technology-related. Some of them we call awareness briefings where we're not trying to sell anything, necessarily. We're trying to make people aware of technology, and "Oh, by the way, in most of the cases, they're IBM products that are associated with those technologies; where some of the other briefings that are sponsored by the brands are related to products. And in general, what we try to do in the briefings is cover the whole range of software development, software implementation at runtime, but all the way back in the beginning from planning time as well, and gathering requirements and so on.

One good thing about the briefings is that we learn a lot when we do them because attendees at these events are always asking questions and asking questions that sometimes we can't answer right away, so we get back to them sometimes. And we learn a lot in the briefings. It's very interesting.

developerWorks: So you're telling the story of the products and the systems, but you're going beyond that. I mean, it's more than just a marketing pitch, obviously.

Miller: Well, certainly for Willie and for me and some of the others on the team, it's, a lot of it comes from our own experience because we're long-time developers and architects, and we sort of slid into this as a result of, you know, consulting with ISVs, actually. And we started doing these briefings, and we try to keep them as technical as possible. But a lot of times, we do get questions that we can only answer from experience in relation to a product or a technology.

developerWorks: So it's a neat opportunity to get to hang out with developers.

Farrell: Yes, that's a really neat opportunity. And we go beyond the sales presentation, right? The salesperson is out there, and they're giving the sales presentation, and often they'll kind of look like ours. But where we go beyond is that we have the demos we can demonstrate, and we know what people want to see because we know what we'd want to see because we've been developers. Jeff and I have been doing this for, you know, way too long. [LAUGHTER]

No, we love what we do. We've been doing it a long time, so we have that experience as we go and we talk to them, and so we can show them the demos. And you asked about, how is it with the tutorials -- we try to tie it all together. So the briefings will point to our tutorials, or maybe a tutorial will then say, you want to know more? It will click you to a place where you can go sign up for the briefing. And then from a briefing, like I said, back to the tutorials, we can point you to a product page, we can show you articles that might have been out there. We always have a long section at the end where we talk about resources, where can you go to learn more ... and say, here's a bunch of links, here's places you can go, here's books you can read. And so what we try and do is give them that first taste, and then point them where, you want to go deeper in this? We can show you where to go deeper in this and learn this technology or product or whatever it might be.

developerWorks: What kind of reaction have you seen to these? I mean, what are some of your favorite memories of things that have gone on at these briefings?

Farrell: Well, when the people show up and they're a little bit skeptical, and you can kind of get that right off the bat. So you're talking about it, and the first questions are, yeah but kind of questions. And you start answering those questions. And then the really favorite thing is where the audience and you are in a dialogue. It's not just a monologue of you standing up there, "Blah, blah, blah, blah." But they're starting to talk back to you, and you're talking to them, and they're talking to each other. So we have to be kind of a moderator and a facilitator sometimes more than just a speaker. And that's when it really gets fun because they're exchanging views with each other, and they're exchanging views with you. And you're all part of that same family -- the brotherhood of software developers or whatever it might be. And we're talking, and we're exchanging information, and we're learning from each other. And that's when the ... those are my favorite memories.

developerWorks: Almost like an in-person forum.

Farrell: It's just fantastic to be able to do something like that, to have all these people having a discussion about something that's really important to them, is really important to IBM. And we, as Jeff said, we learn. They ask these questions or start having a conversation with each other about it, and we know, "Oh, these are the hot buttons. These are the things." And we can go back and talk to products and say, "Hey -- have you considered this? Have you considered that?" So they're a feedback mechanism for IBM, too, which is very, very important in this.

Not only do we have the feedback from the conversations but we also ask them at the end: "Write down your feedback. Please tell us what it is." We encourage them highly to do that. And they do it, and then we read those and we take them back, and we say, "Hey -- this is what people want to talk about. This is what they're concerned about."

developerWorks: Yes, you're answering the next thing I was going to ask: What do you guys get out of it? And it sounds like there's a lot that flows back this way, too.

Farrell: And that's a big part of doing it because you can do a webcast, you can do a podcast, you can write an article, but that's one way. And that's why these developerWorks Live! things are so important because we get that feedback, we get the conversation that goes on between IBM and the developers out there who are interested in our products and our technology. And they can tell us what they're interested in, and we can also say, "Have you thought of this?" And you'll see the lightbulbs go off over some heads, and they'll go, "Oh, I hadn't thought of that. That's a good idea." And that's what makes these things so important because we have that live audience. And you can go to one where maybe, you know, only 20 or 30 people show up and that's great, or you can do some of the ones like Jeff does in China or India. Tell us about that, Jeff.

Miller: Those are a lot of fun. One that we did in Bangkok had 670 attendees. I think that's our all-time record. And for that one, actually, we got no questions. The whole time we had a microphone set up. But in general, doing these and doing the variety of them that we do really adds a lot. It's like the whole is greater than the sum of those individual briefings because we might discuss something in a testing briefing that then we bring up in a development briefing. Or in our awareness briefings, we discuss a lot of stuff about open source or security and so on. Then later on in another briefing, that same question comes up, or that same subject comes up. We can talk about that and add value to the existing content that we have on the slides.

developerWorks: What about how the topics are driven? I know that the IBM brands, there's a lot of impetus there, but are there other ways that you kind of say maybe this is something we need to be doing?

Miller: The security briefing is a good example. You know, we do these briefings with professional developers, and architects, and project managers, and so on. And we also do a lot with universities. And there's a lot of cross-pollination there. So the security briefing, for example, came up initially because university professors were asking about it, and they wanted to know if we had material that we could help them with security because it's a very important subject.

And then we also heard from ISVs and other people in our geos -- we call the different regions in the world the geos -- we heard from the geos that they were also interested in a security briefing if we had something around that. So we put together a security briefing, and that's an example of a new briefing type being developed from input through universities, as well as geos that have heard about it.

So the subject matter that we talk about comes from brands that have a vested interested in us promoting their software, but it also comes from input from attendees, and professors, and ISVs that want to know what we have in this area or what we could talk about, or could we help them with a particular subject? So maybe in our briefing, we'll add some content around a particular subject.

Farrell: I have something else to add to that. Another great example is, we had a briefing that covered software development. And it covered a large gamut of software development tools, from requirements to analysis and design and construction and testing. And you know, all the way through. And what we got from that was people would, "That's great. We really like that. We really want to know more about testing." OK -- so we went off and we did a testing briefing so that we could really put a focus on it and spend a half day on it. Where we were spending maybe an hour in the whole product line type of briefing, we could spend a whole half day on just a handful of testing products and really go a lot deeper and more technical for them. And when adding the testing briefing that said, "Well, now we can take these design, construction, architecture tools, and now we can spend more time on those because we're not doing the whole gamut, we can dive a little deeper." And again, that was feedback that people gave us.

And so we really do listen to the feedback. And that's what drives how we go.... You know, of course, the marketing people and the sales people go, "This is something that we want to tell people about." Great. But we always come back with the feedback from the audience, and that helps tailor it. So between the two, we think we're really focusing on what's going to be most effective for IBM and most effective for the people that are attending.

developerWorks: Hearing you talk about this makes me think about IBM's push with open source. And all the things we're talking about within developerWorks about community, and social networking. It seems like this really fits into that in terms of an opportunity not just to get a message out but to build community.

Farrell: And it really does. And again, when we were talking about our whole line of software development tools, we went, "Oh -- and most of them are based on Eclipse." And a lot of people raised their hand and said, "What's Eclipse?" Oh, we'll put together, we put together a briefing on Eclipse and said, "Here's what it is, and here's why it's important. And it's not a product that IBM sells. It's open source. It's free."

But we want people to understand that because it's a vital part of the strategy that IBM's doing. We're basing all our tools on Eclipse. And that turned into, now we also have an open source briefing. So now we go and we talk about, "Here's open source, and you can get Linux, which is an open source operating system, and you'll get these open source tools." We also have open community tools, and we have a briefing on that that says, "Here's the open community, free tools from IBM that you can do." And we tell people about them and how they can use them. And not only do we tell them about them but the briefing has demonstrations. "Here's how you install it. Here's how you get it up and running. Here's how you can configure it." And people walk away from that going, "Now I know how to do this. I can go get started on this." And they're getting the message from IBM that open source and community and open standards are really the important thing that we're basing all of our development and strategy on.

developerWorks: So to sign up, to go and find out about all this, developerWorks site, the events section, right?

Farrell: If you go to the developerWorks site, there's a link that says Technical Events. And you click on that, and there, all the briefings are right there. And that's where you can sign up to attend, and it's free.

developerWorks: And you can sort them by geography and topic and different things like ...

Farrell: You can sort them by geography, topic, date.

developerWorks: And how much do these things cost?

Farrell: Absolutely free. And breakfast is there, too.

developerWorks: Breakfast?

Farrell: Yes, you can come and get bagels, and fruit, and coffee, and ...

developerWorks: Continental breakfast?

Farrell: That's right.

developerWorks: Those old hard rolls that you break your teeth on?

Farrell: Oh, no, no, no. We do it right. We do it right.

developerWorks: Any closing thoughts?

Farrell: I would just say, you know, please come. We have a lot of fun at these, they really are a gas. And we have so much fun, so come on out and learn, find something you're interested in. Come on out, you'll have a good time. It will be worth your while.

Miller: I was going to say also, well, you said it yourself, Willie. We try to make these fun. We try to make them interesting. We try to make sure that there are no heads nodding off in the middle of our briefings, we try to make them alive. If there are things that people don't know about before they come to the briefing, we hope that this can be a venue where people can really learn.

developerWorks: Thank you, Willie and Jeff. This has been great. We appreciate it.

Farrell: Thank you.

Miller: Thank you.

developerWorks: Again, our guests were Willie Farrell and Jeff Miller with the Developer Skills Program in developerWorks. As they said, see the complete list of complementary developerWorks live briefings and register to attend at ibm.com/developerworks. Just click on Technical Events and Briefings in the right-hand nav. I'm Scott Laningham. Talk to you next time.

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About the author

Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician.

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