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I just returned from a weekend in Tampa, Florida where I attended the Shareware Industry Conference 2000, an annual meeting of shareware authors and support companies where they exchange ideas, try to sell stuff, and hand out awards to one another. The conference is presented by the Shareware Industry Award Foundation, which gives out awards in various categories to authors of shareware programs. They have two sets of awards-those voted on by their members and the People's Choice Awards voted on by the user community. The categories are similar, and there's usually a lot of overlap. The Association of Shareware Professionals is an active participant in the foundation, and they also hand out awards to shareware authors. Ziff Davis was represented, too, and they passed out the ZDNet shareware awards. Well, what they really did was announce the winners on signs posted throughout the lobby during a party and let the winners stand next to the signs. Maybe ZiffDavis knew they were about to be bought by their competitor, CNET, for a paltry 1.6 billion smackeroos and didn't think they could afford a Formal awards ceremony. Anyway, there were enough awards that it seemed everyone could get one, but it didn't work out that way. I didn't get one.
I was there as a speaker to conduct a technical session on testing and debugging, a subject close to every programmer's heart. I had about 30 attendees, mostly programmers. They were all males, too, so when I gave out Dr: Dobbs T-shirts, there was nobody to offend with wet T-shirt jokes, so I didn't bother. I resurrected an old talk with video slides from a conference a couple of years ago but worried that today's Internet-intensive applications and operating environment might make that discussion obsolete. Not to worry. The programmers quickly took over the session and I gladly demoted myself from lecturer to discussion moderator. I went through the motions of paging through the slide show for a while, but the attendees really drove the discussion, so I just turned the thing off and let the session take wing. I learned that when you let a group of programmers do most of the talking and you do a reasonable job of moderating the discussion, people...