Presentation is everything.

So the other day I was at a presentation that went horribly wrong.I’ve never done a presentation at a user group or conference, but it is on my to-do list. I feel like I’ve seen enough presentations that I know what do to, and not do. 

Star and End on time:
Don’t wait another 5-10 minutes to start, and make sure you end when you said you would. As long as you make available your power-point, or code, the stragglers should be able to get what they missed. As long as you provide you contact information, people can ask any lingering questions that didn’t get answered in the allotted time.   

Practice your presentation:You could tell that the guys just hadn’t gone end-to-end on his presentation. He would drop some code in or make a small tweak and everything would blow up. At least 3 of his examples ended with him saying ‘this is really cool, but its not working, I’ll fix it during our break’. 

Don’t read to me:Don’t just read the power point bullet points out loud to me. I’ve been reading a long time, and just to hear you say it isn’t going to be any different than me reading it. If you are going to use some bullet points, expand on what it says. 

Figure out your hardware:I was at one presentation once, and it was painful to watch him use a mouse. In another presentation, the presenter kept stopping and asking everyone in the audience to turn off their wireless mice. Personally I think you should use a wired laser mouse, or at least have a backup that you are used to. 

Don’t deviate from your presentation:Make time for a little Q&A as you go, but you’re still trying to keep things going. If the question isn’t related to what you’re talking about or is going to require a lot of time to answer, suggesting coming back to it at the end if time allows. Also if you are showing code never make changes to it that come from the audience…. Ok, maybe never is a little strong, but make sure you are comfortable with the suggested change that you know it will work, and won’t require a lot of time. I guess those are my heavy hitters for me. I’m curious to see what other peoples’ pet peeves are if you have any I’ve missed.

TimeoutAttribute

Our dev environment is down, something about Java not having enough beans. Anyway I can’t stand not running unit tests, so I’ve pointed our testing framework to our QA environment. I discovered some interesting things about our QA environment, like there was some seed data that wasn’t there, but the more interesting thing is how un-optimal some of our code is. Some code that was running in 400 MS on dev was taking 30 minutes in QA. It was a pain tracking down the culprit. I usually run our test locally using nunit console and ncover . 

I wish I could press a hot key and fail the current running test. Or have a command line parameter that sets the timeout for all the tests. I started thinking, there HAS to be a test attribute to set a tests timeout. I started looking around, and found the Holy Grail TimeoutAttribute Class , figures it’s called Timeout , duh. It works like this:

[TestMethod]
[Timeout(10000)]
public void EmployeeOrderHistoryReport()

The Timeout attribute take how many milliseconds to run the test. If the test takes more than that many milliseconds it times out. So now I’m going though my tests, and decorating the necessary test with Timeout attributes. Reminding me to come back through and add some performance improvements later.

the dumbing down of javascript

I’ve recently started an internal project that is written primarily in JavaScript. It based off of an existing framework, and we’re just adding some features. The original framework’s JavaScript is like nothing I’ve ever seen in JavaScript. It is simple, fast, easy to use, and seems to work in both IE and firefox. (Perhaps more on that in a future post.)Which bring me back to the reason of my post. I think that most developers try to avoid JavaScript at all times. I would guess that your typical web developer turns off ‘Display a notification about every error’. Case in point every time I log in to 53’s website over the past ~12 months I get a JavaScript error. JavaScript is quickly becoming a forgotten language.My web background comes from writing apps in ASP, PHP with JavaScript enhancing usability. So it is frustrating for me that that today’s developers are getting dumber down by using ASP.net, and not realizing that it’s writing out the JavaScript for them. I had one interview candidate answer the question ‘What is AJAX’ with ‘It was what Microsoft built because people didn’t like using JavaScript.’ – LOLI’m not sure what the answer is, I think I’m going to try and come up with some simple interview questions to weed out the chaff. Until then, brush up on your JavaScript.