- Curiousity.
- A growth mindset.
- A willingness to share.
By the end of this, developers should be able to:
- Give a short talk at a professional conference.
- Prepare a talk on a new topic.
- Identify with confidence things known and things not yet known.
- The goal is to explore something other than what we covered in class.
- Your topic must relate to software engineering in some way.
- Presentations should be about 15-20 minutes long, we'll have some time for questions after you present.
- This is very open ended. Choose something you're interested in.
Let's free associate. Pick any topic to start with, and we'll generate as many topics as we can in the allotted time.
Take some time and talk with your rubber ducky. Explain to him or her the idea you chose and why you like it. If you're having trouble deciding on an idea talk it our with Mr. or Ms. Ducky, or your fellow developers.
You may use any technology you wish to guide your presentation.
Slides are the traditional choice:
- Keynote, Google Slides, PowerPoint
- Slides.js, Reveal.js, Deckset, Remark, Spectacle, Deck.js, Impress.js, Fathom.js
If you use slides, follow these guidelines:
- No more than six lines per slide, six words per line, and at least 36 point font size.
- You may wish to substitute words for pictures.
- Do not read your slides.
Following these guidelines means anyone who downloads your slides likely won't know what your talk content is. That means you should upload your speaker notes, or better yet, make a blog post out of your presentation when you upload it to your portfolio.
We've chosen to present materials as READMEs on GitHub. There are many advantages, including:
- Version control (naturally),
- Code formatting and automatic highlighting,
- Example code hosted alongside talk materials, and
- Include as much context as you like.
However, presenting directly from speaker notes is dangerous. Do not fall to the temptation to read directly from your notes. Your notes are a gift to the audience for attending, not a replacement for attending.
If you want to use GitHub to host your talk materials, you could start with one or more of our template repositories:
- ga-wdi-boston/talk-template
- ga-wdi-boston/js-template
- ga-wdi-boston/ruby-template
- ga-wdi-boston/rails-api-template
- ga-wdi-boston/node-template
- ga-wdi-boston/express-template
- ga-wdi-boston/ember-template
Source code distributed under the MIT license. Text and other assets copyright General Assembly, Inc., all rights reserved.