Watch in fascinated horror as Damian writes a program to extract square roots efficiently using nothing but quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the very fabric of the space-time continuum. Along the way we'll also investigate: reducing map-reduce; fun things to do in Copenhagen; the benefits of train surfing in a thunderstorm; the brutal honesty of Australian road signs; when Super Science Adventures go wrong; a sufficiently hard value of "easy"; the greatest Lego kit of all time; the surprising secret identity of a Sith Lord; thinking with graphene; truly linear programming; elementary spin-half quanta under relativistic motion; bongos and beatniks; drunken bets involving penguins; coding backwards and upside-down; a pressing need for 6-dimensional verbs; the awesome power of the delete key; fun with neutronium; the worst of all possible multiverses; and the invention of stage diving.
The best, most effective presentations capture the audience quickly, hold their interest effortlessly, educate and entertain them in equal measure, and sometimes even inspire them. This full-day class explores simple and effective techniques for achieving those goals in any kind of technical presentation.
The first half of the course focuses on preparation, content selection, delivery techniques, and handling questions (or the lack thereof). The second half of the course is an in-depth tutorial on improving the "look and feel" of your presentation materials--regardless of which presentation system you use. In particular, it demonstrates practical techniques for making your slides not suck.
Who should attend?
Anyone who needs to present technical information in front of colleagues, clients, or any other audience.
Damian Conway is a well-known member of the international Open Source community. A widely sought-after speaker and trainer, he is also the author of several technical books as well as numerous Perl software modules.
He runs an international IT training company - Thoughtstream - which provides programmer and speaker training from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia. Until 2010 he was also an Adjunct Associate Professor with the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University.
Over the past decade much of his spare time has been spent working with Larry Wall on the design and promotion of the new Perl 6 programming language.
Other technical and academic areas in which he has published internationally include programming language design, programmer education, object orientation, software engineering, natural language generation, synthetic language generation, emergent systems, declarative programming, image morphing, human-computer interaction, geometric modelling, the psychophysics of perception, nanoscale simulation, and grammar-based parsing.
