There is surely a limit to slides-per-minute, but so far I haven't hit it

[jducoeur]

I should remember to diarize successes, so...

Yesterday was a big presentation at work. Basically entirely self-driven: I'm talking up a particular technology (Akka), so I figured I'd better do an introductory talk on the subject to educate everybody on the topic. Me being me, I publicized it to the entire engineering organization, nation-wide, and got a hundred-some-odd attendees.

My presentation style has evolved a lot over the past five years. I used to do the same turgid PowerPoint bullet lists as everyone else, but that always sucked, as was driven home to the community some years ago by this cartoon:

From Visually.

The trend in tech presentations lately, though, has been really concise, fast, focused little slides that you flip through as you go.

So yesterday? 135 slides -- a new record for me, by a fair margin. Took a fair while to write and edit, but I managed to slide in at 56 minutes (right about as planned), and folks seem to have gotten a lot out of it, so yay. That's probably approaching as fast as I can talk, but I could probably manage even more slides in a talk that had less code and more visuals.

(Disclaimer: a fair number of those slides are really flipbook animations. It might well be possible to accomplish the same effects in fewer slides with a more sophisticated knowledge of Google Slides. The point, though, is to keep the visuals moving.)

Also, kudos to The Noun Project, land of All The Icons. I maintain a professional account there specifically for presentations like this -- there's nothing like being able to grab icons of dragons and swords to use as metaphors for slaying old programming problems to liven up a talk, or showing ActorSystems as communities of people sending letters around. (And sometimes dying when Exceptions happen.) If you ever need to do professional presentations, it's a really helpful library to have available.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I find that more than about 2 or 3 slides per minute and the slides are no longer effective at backing up what you are talking about and keeping some thread of context. Might be able to go more than that if the changes are minor and the context is retained (like showing changes in a graph or chart over time where 90% of the slide is the same and only some new piece is added....)

[jducoeur]

I think you can sometimes go a *little* faster, when the slides are especially short and pithy. But I'm not sure I've done that speed for more than 3-4 slides in a row, so it scarcely counts.

But yeah, like I said -- flipbook animations. A lot of those slides are, for instance, the same code block, but highlighting different parts of it as I review what's going on here. And in the particular case of Akka, a lot of them are showing how messages flow around the system, and how state changes as you go. It's a good deal of work to set up, but seems to help folks understand what's what...

[watersword]

The Noun Project is so great.

[sunlit_stone]

Oooh--I realize this is not even slightly the point of the post, but what were you talking Alka up for/about?

[jducoeur]

We're a Scala/Play shop, so Akka is already involved under the hood. I would like to do some more stuff with it, so I'm educating folks about how it works.

(Can't get into too much detail, since it's company-proprietary code, but Querki -- my own little startup -- is very, very Akka-based, and I've been using Akka literally since the day the original prototype came out.)

[sunlit_stone]

Oh, neat! We used Akka actors a bunch at my old place, but I'm starting a new job this February (if all goes well), and I'm not sure yet what libraries they use over there. Though I can hope for some Akka.

[jducoeur]

Cool -- is the new job Scala stuff?

(I'm actually responsible for one small but useful, if slightly dated, component of the Akka ecosystem, the Requester library.)

And I should check: do we know each other? I took a poke around your profile earlier today and didn't see anything obvious, but it's always a bit hard to know for sure on a pseudonymous platform like DW. And heaven knows, the world of people who know Akka isn't that huge...

[sunlit_stone]

Yep! I'm pretty excited, honestly.

Oh wow, that's awesome! Very cool :D

And I don't believe so--I started coding professionally like April before last (though basically all of my professional experience is in Scala) and before that I was in school, and on top of that I have a fluorescent light sensitivity which makes things like e.g. attending most conferences not very...well, possible. I do know a couple of people in the tech scene in Massachusetts but unless one of them is leading an extremely thorough double life I am reasonably sure you are not they.

(I did start following you in part because if your Scala posts, though.)

ETA: I parted from my last job before we could start using typed actors, but I'm definitely excited about them :D

[jducoeur]

Cool -- well, feel free to ping me if you have Scala questions, and howdy!

[cvirtue]

Has the audience indicated the pace works for them as well?

[jducoeur]

Given the number of people who have complimented me on the presentation, I think so. (My grandboss basically ordered the rest of the team to watch the recording if they hadn't already seen it.)

[cvirtue]

Excellent!