Memoires of a powerpoint virgin

So, we’re in the mid­dle of Code­gar­den. Good crowd, inter­est­ing peo­ple ask­ing inter­est­ing ques­tions — we’re hav­ing a blast.

Fin­ished my pre­sen­ta­tion on opti­miz­ing devel­op­ment with css and decent markup a cou­ple of hours ago. Besides being slightly under­pre­pared (or rather: hav­ing changed the focus quite some times dur­ing the prepa­ra­tions) and not hav­ing slept for two days, a few other things could’ve needed improve­ment. Take this advice from a pow­er­point vir­gin, doing his first real presentation:

- Screw pow­er­point. We said “No pow­er­point dri­ven sales talk” — so I, for some rea­son, made pow­er­point dri­ven css talk. The slight­est bit of ner­vous­ness instantly turns pow­er­point into a crutch…which is bor­ing and messes with your flow.
– Do research on your crowd. Not know­ing whether peo­ple know (in my case) css and/or umbraco makes it hard to set­tle for the level of abstrac­tion.
– Run through every bit of infor­ma­tion you base your pre­sen­ta­tion on; any­thing not imme­di­ately under­stood by the audi­ence removes focus from your beat­i­fully thought up, abstract ‘best practices’-type speech.
– Demo. No, really — Demo! What­ever. Typ­ing huge amounts of css (or any­thing else for that mat­ter) live is defi­nately bor­ing, but show­ing the end result and the code mak­ing it, even if the tweaking-bit isn’t what you really want to focus on, makes it seem a tad boring.

Despite my lack of sleep and lots of other stuff to do (got do get going doing those pod­casts), I’ve really got that “damn, I can improve that with all the stuff I just learned so I might as well do it now”-feeling.