Rail Spikes: Lightning talk: How not to present at RailsConf, in 14 easy steps

Lightning talk: How not to present at RailsConf, in 14 easy steps

Posted by Jon

on Friday, June 06

I gave this Lightning Talk on the last day of RailsConf.

Gregg Pollack – June 06, 2008 @ 08:39 PM

Well done… although I like some of these techniques, it’s funny how slide 2.0 has become more standardized.

Cameron Booth – June 07, 2008 @ 12:23 AM

Hey Jon, I saw this presentation and thought it was great. Well done. Will you be a RubyFringe with Luke? Maybe we’ll meet there ;-)

Jon Dahl – June 07, 2008 @ 02:04 PM

Gregg: yeah, while I think these 14 are all things to avoid, I’m sometimes guilty of a few of them. My presentations often start as “Slide 2.0”, with each key word on a slide. As I practice, I change this by cutting slides and changing words into pictures/videos/examples. And I never noticed how bad the black Textmate color scheme looks on a projector until last weekend. (I swear it wasn’t that bad at conferences past!)

Cameron: RubyFringe looks like the best conference of the year. Unfortunately, I don’t know if my conference budget can cover it. Let me check airfare one more time. :)

Eric Chapweske develops Ruby-fueled projects at Slantwise Design's worldwide headquarters in Minneapolis. When not reading through Rails source code, he can likely be found in a kitchen mastering his Korean cooking skills.
Jon Dahl started using Ruby on Rails in 2005 and hasn't looked back. He is a founder of Zencoder, a startup offering video encoding software as a service.
Luke Francl is a developer at Tumblon. He came to Ruby from the Java world and still thinks database constraints belong in the database. His personal blog is Just Looking.