Presenting Rails

Ok, so this post was going to be how I gave an absolutely rocking presentation on Rails to my local LUG group (SLUG).

Unfortunately, I was giving the second talk and the first one began late and then ran way over-time. So my talk was pre-empted. The SLUG team were really nice about it (they even bought me dinner), and I'll be running it next month instead.

I certainly can't fault them - the first talk was on the cool OLPC project. I was interested in listening myself. Besides which, an extra month will give me more time to polish the talk and prepare that demo I'd meant to organise...

Anyway, I did want to mention a really cool talk I stumbled over while researching other Introductory Rails talks. Jim Weirich gave this talk and has a lot of reference material available here, but what I wanted to point out the neat slide software he used.

It's called "The Takahashi method" and is a XUL file that runs in your browser. It lets you write simple and effective slides with an image or a few words on each. These give great impact to what you're trying to say.

The data file for the slides is simple plain-text markup, so it's ultra-quick to write up your slides from your presentation notes.

Here is a link to Jim's slides and data. See how punchy that is.

Anyway, that's what I would have used... if I had the chance ;)