Slides for my Grails Exchange 2007 talk
So I talked at Grails Exchange 2007 about how we used Grails 0.4 through 0.5.6 to deploy five commercial branded websites in 2007.
Skills Matter asked for all the slides up front, like most conferences do, but I "refused" because if you are doing a presentation that is not death by powerpoint, printed/pre-available material ruins the experience and stops people paying attention.
Finally I have put the slides into a PDF (24MB) so they can be viewed alongside watching the video of the talk. There’s also an HTML version here so you don’t need to download it all first. The video of the talk rarely includes the slides so following it is a bit of a tricky endeavour. Please note that these slides are not complete because the "Render slide for every stage of build" option in Keynote doesn’t do what it says. It doesn’t render build items that are part of smart builds… so when you get to the "Build scripts" slide, you have to imagine the other text coming up one by one… Bean/Spring configuration… ORM Mapping… Deployment descriptor… Log configuration… Test database… Servlet Container… and then "bang".
I’m new to presenting and it shows, but I had a good time doing it. I’m a big fan of Presentation Zen and I really dislike bullet point presentations. The Presentation Zen book rocks - I only wish it was out before I did my talk! Your talks will be changed forever for the better if you buy it and read it. Garr Reynolds, the author, has a great blog.
However people laughed at the right points which was good fun circa slides 14-16. You end up with a lot more slides with this kind of approach, and its hard work to put it together, but its more fun.
It is hard to apply these principles to the "this is how you code it" part of technical talks… I’ll continue experimenting with it. I find large chunks of code in presentations hard to follow, and quite boring frankly. I’m more impressed by the results of the code and a little info about how, for the rest I’ll use docs / a book.
Thanks for everyone who came to my talk at the end of the day back in October - like I said on the day it wasn’t exactly going to tax people mentally, a bit of light entertainment Grails propaganda. Sorry it took so long to get the slides up, but you’ll see why I had to wait for the video to be live before I did it.
Grails 1.0 is coming soon…