KEBAB

Friday November 23

My company has this KEBAB event organized twice a year. It is a technical sharing session where we have specialists within our organization coming to do presentation and elucidate some very interesting technologies that can be beneficial to other IBM colleagues. It's a also one of the best chance to meet other colleagues that you don't normally know because the company is just too big!

I have never been to this event, practically missing the last two occasions due to I-also-do-not-know-why reason... Anyway, I made it up this time, and even more, I volunteered to be a presenter!

So voilà, I came back from South Africa in the weekend and basically I have 5 days time to prepare an hour powerpoint sheet and speech! And you have got to minus those 8 hours daily project work and Dutch courses and badminton training sessions!! Furthermore I needed to take Dutch test on Wednesday night because I had missed it during my holidays!!!

Anyhow, I still survived that :) The event was really **COOL**. I joined a few fascinating sessions, encircling the J2EE technologies like EJB 3.0, Maven and etc. I did my presentation at 4pm on the topic of AJAX. I was glad that quite a number of attendees turned up to my session, including some architects that I have come to know. Gladly I didn't have a stage fright and I took it up quite well actually! There were a few tricky questions from the geeks but hey, guess I am also a geek to be able to answer them :)

I finished at 5pm, didn't even have time for the Q&A session. Overall I was rather satisfied with my performance. Besides, taking up this role allows me to have a better contact with other colleagues and of course, to build network, which IBM also encourages. During the drinks session, people came to congratulate me, and I was even offered an opportunity to work on an interesting project! So let's see where will I belong to after the completion of my current assignment in December :)

I am SO looking forward to 2008!