Jeffry Houser's Blog

I just got the session reviews from my 360Flex session on Building Custom Components. This is a huge boost to my ego. You can review them here, if you're so inclined.

Here are some of my comments to the comments:

I got the impression from speaking to people that I'm one of the few presenters who said "I'm not sure". No one knows everything, especially me. I'm fine with that!

I know when you're up in front of a crowd, it can be pretty scary. I often joke that to prepare for a presentation I would crawl up in a ball and cry. As a presenter, you want to be seen as the expert; you want to be seen as authoritative; you don't want to be seen as some bumbler who got his speaking slot through clerical error. I used to be afraid of not knowing stuff. BSing an answer will just frustrate those in the audience. Coders can smell BS a mile away. I think perhaps producing The Flex Show has given me a breadth of experience that makes me believe it's okay to flaunt my ignorance. I'm talking to a new person every other week on some topic I know next to nothing about.

I've done enough presentations that I'm starting to produce my own style. I ask the audience a lot of questions and try to get a good back and forth going. I'm very comfortable with that style. I don't like lectures, so I try to keep it interactive. At 360Flex, I did a fantastic job of keeping that interaction going. I'm glad most people enjoyed that.

Thanks, thanks, and thanks!

I don't believe I can offer any control over what other speakers do; and I hardly think I'm fit to train anyone in public speaking. But, thanks for the compliments.

But, of course not everyone was completely happy, here are some of the complaints:

The session was intended to be an intro / basic session. I even billed it as such in the program guide and added a disclaimer slide in the beginning of my preso. When playing with many guitarists, I developed a theory on the world. If a guitarist says "This song is easy" it means "I know how to play it." If a guitarist says "That song is hard" it means "I don't know how to play it." I think coders are the same way. Introductory and basic content is all from the perspective of the person receiving the info, and what they already know.

I've heard this before in other presentations. Some people don't like that style of presentation. I can understand that. I personally hate soliloquy lectures and am not successful giving presentations like that. I feed off the audience like a performer.

I'm not sure if this was directed at me specifically, or an overall comment to John and Tom about all presentations. Writing code takes time. It takes even more time when you write it on the fly in front of people. It is not practical to write each sample on the fly during the presentation. For that you really need more time; such as with a hands on session.

Did any of the presenters write lots of code on the fly?

For those interesetd, I'll be giving the same presentation at 360FlexCamp in Jersey.

This entry was posted on September 18, 2008 at 11:00 AM

posted by Jeffry Houser in Flex, Writing and Presenting, Professional
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