Last week I was in Boston for the annual Bio-IT World Conference and Expo. I spent most of the conference working the company booth. It was a lot of fun talking to people about what our software does. Even the conversations that won’t lead to a sale were interesting because I got to learn more about what other people are doing. Of course, there were some people who lit up when I gave a demo (and let’s be honest, it’s probably not just my charming personality).

My role wasn’t just limited to booth duty, though. On Thursday morning, I chaired a session in the cloud track. I was a little nervous chairing a session at a conference I’ve never attended in a domain that I know next-to-nothing about. Fortunately, it went very well. Perhaps too well, as we got so far ahead of schedule that we had to ad lib 10 minutes of Q&A before the last presentation. But it worked well enough, and the talks were really interesting.

When I was introduced ahead of the conference to the presenters, I asked all of them for guidance on how to pronounce their names in addition to the bio that the conference organizers asked them to send. The next time I chair a conference session, I’m also going to ask for a few questions in case there are none from the audience. Sometimes, the pump just has to be primed a bit, and I’d rather ask a question that the presenter thinks is relevant than whatever I come up with while listening to the talk.