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.