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 ;)

Linuxchix Rails talk

I gave my first ever talk at Linuxchix on Monday. It was an overview of Rails. I kept it informal as we're never sure of the venue or how many people will turn up. As it turned out there were around ten people and we sat in a fairly noisy area outside of Gloria Jean's at St Leonard's.

It apparently went quite well, given the location and the necessary informality. I briefly went over why Rails is so appealing to businesses and what it actually does to help a developer build a web app. I ended with a vague discussion about MVC architecture and took a few questions. People seemed particularly interested in the causes behind Rail's reported slowness: which unfortunately I don't actually know. So I'll have to research that for next time.

I had a few positive tips for improvement come out of it too. Mainly it was suggested that I tie the talk together with a narrative element - as people naturally respond to stories. It gives people a hook to hang onto as they follow the points you're presenting. Slides or a demo would have been good too - but that was a limitation of the venue.

Afterward, of course, we all headed off to SLUG and some interesting talks, including one on how AV was used during LCA, and another on the Google Summer-of-code project.