Tech presentation



  • Anyone got ideas for a quick tech topic I can do a presentation that wouldn't take too long to prepare for? For the 25th.

    It would be relatively high level.

    ColdFusion - NO
    SQL - Maybe
    .NET - Others are more experienced than I am

    I've been trying to get more into testing and automation now.

    Thought?



  • @karla said in Tech presentation:

    ColdFusion - NO
    SQL - Maybe
    .NET - Others are more experienced than I am

    None of these things are really topics, they're just technologies.

    Who's the audience? How much time do you have? Is it going to be posted online afterward? If so, do you need slides to go with the audio or is it video? I'm not trying to grill you, just a presentation to 5-year-olds who need a 10 minute snack break is going to be very different than a presentation at some professional association full of PhDs.

    My personal preference is anything that focuses on history and "how we got to this point". You could pick basically any feature of any OS and discuss why we do it the way we do it now, and what history led us to this point.



  • @blakeyrat said in Tech presentation:

    @karla said in Tech presentation:

    ColdFusion - NO
    SQL - Maybe
    .NET - Others are more experienced than I am

    None of these things are really topics, they're just technologies.

    Who's the audience? How much time do you have? Is it going to be posted online afterward? If so, do you need slides to go with the audio or is it video? I'm not trying to grill you, just a presentation to 5-year-olds who need a 10 minute snack break is going to be very different than a presentation at some professional association full of PhDs.

    My personal preference is anything that focuses on history and "how we got to this point". You could pick basically any feature of any OS and discuss why we do it the way we do it now, and what history led us to this point.

    I didn't give a lot detail.

    We have a monthly "Tech Forum" since the new boss*2 👨🏽🎨 started.

    This is to our IT department, mostly developers, also BAs and PMs.

    In our first, 👨🏽🎨 talked about his vision for the department. Got into details about using MongoDB as document storage.

    In the second, he brought in a Microsoft trainer who did about 90 minutes on Scrum and TFS. (He later came in for 3 days for TFS training.)

    One of the PMs keeps asking for volunteers and most of our developers don't like talking to groups. I'm trying to be a team player.

    Session goes for 2 hours but I wouldn't have to fill that whole time. And 👨🏽🎨 mentioned how they might cancel it if they don't get any volunteers.

    I think talking about best practices in both development and processing (especially something we are not currently doing right now but want) would be a good choice.

    It would be held on 8/25. So a little over a week to prepare.



  • @karla Two hours is too long for pure presentation. Consider an activity attendees could do on their laptop to fill a half hour.

    Other than that it sounds like you already have a handle on it.



  • @karla said in Tech presentation:

    I think talking about best practices in both development and processing (especially something we are not currently doing right now but want) would be a good choice.

    One thing that could be interesting (if slightly risky) would be to present that as a sort of "coding confessionals" / "coding horrors" type presentation - things within your existing systems that have been fixed, and why they were fixed the way they were or how the best practice could avoid the problem in the future. The risk there is that if your horrors aren't anonymized enough, they wind up looking like you're running someone over with the bus (and even running over the dearly departed isn't "safe", since they almost certainly had at least a couple people on the team that liked working with them). I would probably say "damn the risk, people need to know why they suck at coding", but I'm fairly socially blunt :P (and have DBA-PTSD)



  • @blakeyrat said in Tech presentation:

    @karla Two hours is too long for pure presentation. Consider an activity attendees could do on their laptop to fill a half hour.

    Other than that it sounds like you already have a handle on it.

    Oh, I don't even need to try to keep them busy for two hours. Hire ups will fill some of the time or we will finish early.

    I'm not worried about length. If it ends up being only 10 minutes, I'm fine.

    My question is, what process/practice can I put together a smallish presentation in the next week?

    I'm personally interested in DevOps and getting things more automated (especially testing) but how can I break done those topics into something that I can put together in a couple hours?



  • @karla how about picking a part of devOos you're not very familiar yet? Having to explain something to others can be a great motivation to learn



  • @karla said in Tech presentation:

    I'm personally interested in DevOps and getting things more automated (especially testing) but how can I break done those topics into something that I can put together in a couple hours?

    Well I know nothing about DevOps (other than vaguely what it's about) so you can just do a tutorial starting from scratch. Again, go into the historical focus-- how is your time saved using modern DevOps techniques compared to what came before? Demonstrate how it can solve problems, look to the headlines-- that company that bricked like 500 "smart" locks and locked people out of their homes must have fucked up something in their DevOps, right? So explain what processes they could have used to ensure that didn't happen.

    Since I think automated testing isn't nearly as useful as other people seem to think it is, I can't help you there.



  • @izzion said in Tech presentation:

    @karla said in Tech presentation:

    I think talking about best practices in both development and processing (especially something we are not currently doing right now but want) would be a good choice.

    One thing that could be interesting (if slightly risky) would be to present that as a sort of "coding confessionals" / "coding horrors" type presentation - things within your existing systems that have been fixed, and why they were fixed the way they were or how the best practice could avoid the problem in the future. The risk there is that if your horrors aren't anonymized enough, they wind up looking like you're running someone over with the bus (and even running over the dearly departed isn't "safe", since they almost certainly had at least a couple people on the team that liked working with them). I would probably say "damn the risk, people need to know why they suck at coding", but I'm fairly socially blunt :P (and have DBA-PTSD)

    Yeah probably not the best idea...unless I deal with my own mistakes. Or even just dealing with technical debt for a more than 10 yo application.



  • Thanks all for the input.

    I don't think I am making up my mind for this one..but I'll consider doing the next month's session.



  • @karla said in Tech presentation:

    Yeah probably not the best idea...unless I deal with my own mistakes

    That's the best idea. No one can accuse you of picking on them if you pick on yourself. And if you're clever enough, you can pick the errors similar to the ones you saw in others



  • I am so glad I work for myself. I haven't had to deal with this sort of shit of over a year.



  • @lucas1 said in Tech presentation:

    I am so glad I work for myself. I haven't had to deal with this sort of shit of over a year.

    I don't have to. I am choosing to.



  • @karla Why?



  • @lucas1 said in Tech presentation:

    @karla Why?

    I like technology, I like talking about it.

    Also, I've sang bad karaoke in front of drunk people, OTOH talking tech to my coworkers is significantly easier.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @karla said in Tech presentation:

    Thought?

    Should totally do a TCP Client-server chat architecture presentation, able to handle multiple clients simultaneously.



  • The LenPeg image compression algorithm family.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    I used to do hour-long talks every week. It was nice; I could pick some random corner of the tech industry, often stuff I'd seen on here, and teach people about it. I don't know what your company uses, but I did talks about The Phoenix Project, TDD, RUM, Docker Containers, SemVer, stuff like that that turned out to be useful in people's lives. DevOps is a great topic, but you'll want to structure it somehow, which is why I usually start with The Phoenix Project and then move into a practical explanation. The boyscout analogy from The Goal is a good one to talk through:

    0_1502973713672_56585e7d-1438-4037-b3e3-0f786ec77d20-image.png

    This is a great graphic to put up when you start getting into the technical bits:

    0_1502973682692_d2ac3d92-1863-498d-b03d-88fedcad0624-image.png



  • @karla
    Though work would probably frown upon you being drunk while talking tech to your coworkers 🍹



  • @yamikuronue I love ya but that Boy Scout analogy is so bad.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @blakeyrat On that slide or in the book? I found it useful in the book, that slide I pasted does a poor job of telling it.



  • @yamikuronue Well I haven't read the book, but that slide is taking easy-to-understand things and adding a whole layer of Boy Scout things that represent them, except more people know how factories work than have been in the Boy Scouts so it seems utterly counter-productive.

    Plus since you're writing software and not LITERALLY running a factory, you have an analogy of an analogy, which adds even more confusion.

    And you're not even using Boy Scouts as Boy Scouts. "The energy output of each boy?" Measured in, what, horsepower? Are your boys actually diesel-electric locomotives or something? When you go to a Boy Scout meeting, are there constant conversations about how many joules each kid is producing as they carve pinewood derby cars? Is there ANOTHER layer of analogy here?

    "The product is walk the trail" is so close to utter gibberish, then when you get down a few bulletpoints you learn that's not even true. The product is finish walking the trail. At least it seems to be, the analogy is so confusing I can't be sure. When you're in a factory the product isn't "travel along the conveyor belt", it's the box that goes into the truck or train car at the end.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @blakeyrat said in Tech presentation:

    "The energy output of each boy?" Measured in, what, horsepower?

    yeah, they tried to get waaay too literal with the analogy. I only included the slide so people would know which analogy I meant.



  • @yamikuronue But but but... but the factory's already an analogy for software development. And people know how factories work. And people know that machines consume power.

    Sorry, that analogy is just bad.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @blakeyrat The Goal was made for literal factories, so in that case, the factory wasn't an analogy.



  • @yamikuronue But you were presenting this slide. Were you talking to factory workers?


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @blakeyrat Oh! I see where I led you astray. That's not my slide, I just found it in google images. My actual slides are out there under my real name, so I didn't share any of them.






  • 🚽 Regular

    @yamikuronue said in Tech presentation:

    RUM

    Real User Monitoring, I suppose. "Rum" is slightly hard to Google if you don't know what the acronym stands for.



  • @izzion said in Tech presentation:

    @karla
    Though work would probably frown upon you being drunk while talking tech to your coworkers 🍹

    The point about me being drunk is not relevant (I have done it sober). The fact that the audience is drunk eliminates filters on what is appropriate to yell out load.



    1. Find a (technology related) problem that has actually occurred in your environment
    2. Determine how it was solved
    3. PRESENT!

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