Presentation Patterns (& Anti-patterns)
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00:00
Presentation of a groupTelecommunicationProcess (computing)Object (grammar)Thread (computing)CoroutineRadical (chemistry)Message passingSoftware developerException handlingMacro (computer science)Level (video gaming)WindowBit rateMultiplication signSlide ruleInformationEndliche ModelltheoriePhysical lawReal numberBoiling pointPresentation of a groupPower (physics)Different (Kate Ryan album)Pattern languageData structureArithmetic meanWordTelecommunicationHypermediaPoint (geometry)BitWater vaporComputer fontDenial-of-service attackLine (geometry)Single-precision floating-point formatElement (mathematics)SoftwareComputer fileWeb pageNatural numberDean numberQuicksortWorkstation <Musikinstrument>Goodness of fitOnline helpCoefficient of determinationCopyright infringementLogicState of matterChemical equation2 (number)Morley's categoricity theoremFormal languageNeuroinformatikThomas BayesContent (media)Data miningConstraint (mathematics)MereologyTerm (mathematics)Performance appraisalGraphics tabletCategory of beingData storage deviceComputer clusterVisualization (computer graphics)40 (number)Web crawlerGame controllerView (database)BootingMiniDiscXMLUML
08:42
WindowMacro (computer science)Object (grammar)SoftwareSeries (mathematics)Level (video gaming)Musical ensembleEvent horizonService (economics)Java appletBuildingPoint (geometry)Term (mathematics)Programming paradigmVector potentialState of matterElectric currentDirection (geometry)Tablet computerInformationPresentation of a groupLine (geometry)Pattern languageSpacetimeMedical imagingDirected graphSeries (mathematics)Musical ensembleSoftware developerDenial-of-service attack2 (number)Slide ruleGreatest elementAbstractionConservation lawSocial classObject (grammar)State observerFlow separationInstance (computer science)Different (Kate Ryan album)Visualization (computer graphics)WordException handlingTouchscreenNumberInheritance (object-oriented programming)Arithmetic meanTerm (mathematics)Block (periodic table)Electronic mailing listCuboidBuildingStandard deviationLatent heatLevel (video gaming)MultiplicationTemplate (C++)EmailDigital watermarkingWeb pageFile formatComputer fontFreewarePower (physics)Real numberPoint (geometry)Student's t-testSoftwareTable (information)Degree (graph theory)Projective planeNoise (electronics)Ocean currentDecimalMathematicsSweep line algorithmXMLComputer animation
17:20
InformationSlide ruleArithmetic progressionFunctional (mathematics)Slide ruleVisualization (computer graphics)Multiplication signProcess (computing)Entire functionTerm (mathematics)MereologyExterior algebraTest-driven developmentArc (geometry)Functional programmingPattern languageSet (mathematics)Point (geometry)Presentation of a groupPrice indexGroup actionEmailBridging (networking)Data conversionRight angleDisk read-and-write headInstallation artCopyright infringementQuicksortUniverse (mathematics)Observational studySoftware design patternLevel (video gaming)RankingExpert systemWave packetGame controllerSheaf (mathematics)Flow separationDemonDynamical systemSinc functionDirection (geometry)Software frameworkCohesion (computer science)Data structureNetwork topologyMedical imagingComputer programmingMatrix (mathematics)Office suiteSpeech synthesisSoftware developerOrder (biology)Software testingBitMathematicsFraktalgeometrieFormal languageAuthorizationAverageContrast (vision)OctahedronTouchscreenKey (cryptography)Social classDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Computer architectureGame theoryData storage deviceComputer animation
25:58
Motion captureHTTP cookieSlide ruleMessage passingPoint (geometry)Term (mathematics)Programming paradigmDependent and independent variablesVector potentialConfidence intervalState of matterElectric currentDirection (geometry)Content (media)WindowConsistencyBasis <Mathematik>Data modelWebsiteFrequencyMachine visionExpert systemMusical ensembleFile formatDisk read-and-write headBoundary value problemMappingMultiplication signCore dumpPresentation of a groupComputer fontPhase transitionData structureSlide rulePattern languageLevel (video gaming)MereologyMusical ensembleGroup actionFlow separationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Free variables and bound variablesControl flowBounded variationPoint (geometry)Message passingInformationHTTP cookieMotion captureCorrelation and dependenceHierarchyBijectionOrder (biology)PlastikkarteSubject indexingExecution unitDatabaseGraph (mathematics)BitQuicksortTerm (mathematics)Asynchronous Transfer ModeExterior algebraCode refactoringFrequencyDenial-of-service attackCodeNetwork topologyConnected spaceContent (media)TouchscreenArrow of timeHand fanRight angleChainStudent's t-testPersonal identification numberCorrespondence (mathematics)Power (physics)MaizeData miningFigurate numberNeuroinformatikPlotterSheaf (mathematics)WordSystem callVirtual machineDemosceneReal numberDivisorComputer animation
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String (computer science)MereologyAbstractionBoundary value problemStatement (computer science)Slide ruleMessage passingIterationForceControl flowComputer-generated imageryPresentation of a groupInformationTrailElectronic data processingStandard deviationElectronic mailing listCombinational logicCASE <Informatik>Pattern languageContext awarenessInformationTrailTerm (mathematics)Web browserSlide ruleWeb applicationGroup actionDigital photographyContent (media)Link (knot theory)WebsiteTemporal logicMultiplication signBitCuboidRight angleWeb page2 (number)Letterpress printingPoint (geometry)Set (mathematics)Client (computing)HTTP cookieTape driveHierarchyCode refactoringDataflowInheritance (object-oriented programming)Object (grammar)Random matrixCopyright infringementComputer wormElement (mathematics)Message passingExecution unitPresentation of a groupMereologyQuicksortDecision theoryPower (physics)Figurate numberSystem callArmBuildingWeb 2.0Visualization (computer graphics)WordConfidence intervalMathematicsPRINCE2Formal grammarSocial classComputer animation
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Electronic data processingDemonCoding theoryProduct (business)Task (computing)Social classAlgebraic closureOvalDecision tree learningString (computer science)Order (biology)Exception handlingJava appletOpen setShift operatorPairwise comparisonKey (cryptography)Web crawlerCodeCartesian coordinate systemIntegrated development environmentCASE <Informatik>Execution unitType theoryWallpaper groupLevel (video gaming)Multiplication signDebuggerGroup actionLine (geometry)Slide ruleVideo projectorSound effectContext awarenessSystem callCombinational logicSoftware testingPattern languageDisk read-and-write headOverlay-Netz1 (number)QuicksortGreatest elementPresentation of a groupElement (mathematics)SmoothingBacktrackingArtificial lifeInteractive televisionInformationDemo (music)Data structureOpen sourceShift operatorPoint (geometry)BuildingMereologyContrast (vision)Social classSinc functionGraph coloringSoftware developerTask (computing)Content (media)Computer musicConfidence intervalLie groupTouchscreenForcing (mathematics)SpacetimeInternetworkingInheritance (object-oriented programming)Different (Kate Ryan album)TorusReal numberSoftware development kitMoving averageComa BerenicesPower (physics)Product (business)CuboidBit ratePixelComputer animation
51:51
WindowGamma functionPopulation densityAddressing modeSlide ruleWordContent (media)Presentation of a groupBitPattern languageMultiplication signPresentation of a groupPoint (geometry)Demo (music)2 (number)Algebraic closureSlide ruleMereologyServer (computing)WordTape driveMeta elementVideoconferencingInternetworkingLipschitz-StetigkeitCodeType theoryInformationMusical ensembleReal numberObject (grammar)Mobile appRow (database)Perturbation theoryComa BerenicesContext awarenessFilm editingContent (media)Sound effectGroup actionSynchronizationExtreme programmingMiddlewareLevel (video gaming)PlanningRight angleData miningSystem callMathematicsElectronic program guideCausalitySelf-organizationSpeech synthesisData managementFocus (optics)Execution unitCrash (computing)WhiteboardDirected graphService-oriented architectureDampingComputer animation
01:00:29
Presentation of a groupContent (media)Computer animationXMLUML
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:06
All right. Welcome, everyone, this afternoon to probably the most unusual talk at this conference given the overall nature of this conference. This is a book on presentation patterns, and this is not the kind of presentation patterns talk that you'd normally
00:22
expect here. This is not some sort of model view controller kind of patterns on the presentation layer. This is actually doing these kinds of technical presentations. And maybe it would fit in better at a conference like this if I called it this instead, but that's really what this talk is, is how to build more effective presentations using tools like Keynote
00:44
and PowerPoint. And I'm going to talk about the approach that we took on this book, and in fact the structure of our book that we wrote about this subject is in three pieces, how to prepare for talks, how to build talks, how to deliver them, and then some ideas about how to build
01:00
presentations around this idea of the jeweler's hammer. So this book really came about kind of as a law of unintended consequences because I've done lots of conference talks. In fact, I'll show you some of my very old presentations, but I realized at some point that PowerPoint and tools like that have become the standard language of most corporations. We were brought
01:25
into an engagement at some point, and we were doing this big architectural assessment, and we were told by the people who brought us in, the deliverable for this work is a PowerPoint slide deck because our CTO is really good at flipping through PowerPoint slide decks really fast. And we said, no, we're not going to give you a PowerPoint slide deck because that's the
01:45
last thing that we want is for them to take it and try to consume it as quickly as possible. Because while some information you can consume like fast food as quickly as possible, some deeper things you need a little bit of time. And it got me to thinking about what is the real
02:01
difference between written prose and a presentation? What's the real difference when you boil it all down? Because when you give something to someone in your company, you could give it to them as a PowerPoint slide deck or a keynote file, or you could give it to them in Word or Pages or something like that. So what's the real difference between these
02:20
two things? The real difference boils down to time. When I'm doing a presentation, I control the exposition rate of the information. I control all the timing. If you're looking at this as a printed document, you get to control the timing. But when I'm doing
02:40
it in front of you, I get to control the timing. And it turns out timing is important sometimes because timing and emphasis can add or subtract from the meaning of the words that show up on a slide. So that's one of the key differences is this presence of time. And we'll see that you can take advantage of time in all sorts of interesting ways
03:01
during presentations. The other thing that really sets them apart is a visual kind of creativity that you normally don't see in printed documents. It's certainly possible using the tools, but that's not the style that's been adapted. And visual creativity is something that's very, very important to me and my wife, and I'll give you an example
03:21
of that. My wife and I every year throw an insanely elaborate Halloween party. We invite over 100 people. My wife starts decorating for this thing on August 1st. Now, Halloween is not until October 31st, but she spends that entire time decorating our condo. So, for example, this is our bedroom that we sleep in while the Halloween party is going
03:44
on. This is the ceiling of the bedroom. We have spiders mounted to the ceiling. I sleep under this about four months out of the year, depending on if we're decorating for Halloween or not, because this is one of the rooms that gets done quite early. This is the hallway that leads into our foyer. I'm the proud owner of more than 100 rubber
04:01
bats that we hang from the ceiling in our foyer. We also make this a costume party, and it's a required costume party. You have to wear a costume to come to this party, and we give away quite good prizes. We give away an iPad for the very best costume every year. So, we're really encouraging people to go over the top and be creative.
04:22
So, some of you may recognize this guy. This is a well-known technical speaker, Scott Davis, and his wife. He came as Dorothy, and she came as the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz. Some of you also may recognize this guy, Stuart Hallaway, who did a talk earlier and is going to do a talk tomorrow here. He came to our Halloween party, and we actually created a new costume category prize just for Stuart, because the year he
04:46
came, he didn't look like this. He came as a character from Battlestar Galactica. He shaved himself into male pattern baldness just for his costume, and so we invented a costume category called Committed to the Costume. If you're willing to shave part of
05:02
your body for the purposes of the party, then you usually get a little prize of some kind at least, and so he's got a costume prize named after him. This is me and my wife the year that the theme was Mummies. This is one of my co-authors, Nate Shuta, and his wife, the year that our theme was Pirates. And we have a theme,
05:23
and you can come as the theme or not, but it's really nice having the theme, because just that little bit of constraint generates a lot of creativity. So, another friend of mine who's also a technical speaker, the year that it was Pirates came as a pirate, but he came as a software pirate. And those are in fact a legit Apple II disk drive that
05:43
still works, and he still has a computer in his basement that can boot up all these things and these disks that he has. And this is the year that I was a pirate. But while this is pretty embarrassing, I'm going to show you something even more embarrassing, which is one of my presentations from the late 1990s at a
06:03
Moreland conference. This is what all of my slides used to look like, and this is going to look a little familiar to some of you from some of the things you've seen recently. And this is now full of what I now call anti-patterns. Flood marks, which are like water marks, but there's so many of them, there's a flood of them. This bullet-riddled
06:22
corpse idea of having bullets and a whole bunch of text—I'll go into more of that later—and a broken outline. You really shouldn't have a single outline element and things under it. That really should be the title of the slide and the points under it. The point of this is, though, I did a lot of really terrible slides like that, but over time I got better. So I started—my first conference was in 1996 at a Moreland
06:45
conference, and I've been doing this on and off for years now. And I finally reached a point in about 2007 where I'd done hundreds of conference presentations, and my slides had evolved and gotten much better, and they look like this now. And I was
07:01
using Keynote now, which has very nice visuals, and I was using, notice, the really nice state-of-the-art 3D metallic bullets on my slide, which is the absolute state of the art in terms of bullet technology. And I was doing this talk, and I got an evaluation back from someone who said, really love the
07:21
content, but old-fashioned presentation style. And I said, old-fashioned presentation style? Did you notice I used the 3D metallic bullets in my presentation? But that really got me started thinking about, what are we using this tool for? Is it just a way to generate bulleted lists so that I can read it to someone when that slide comes
07:41
up? And in fact, we started calling this a bullet brittle corpse. And the problem with having a slide like this, it's just a bullet with a bunch of words on it, is that as soon as I bring a slide like that up, every single person in the room will read the entire thing. You can't help yourself but read the entire thing, and now I'm going to spend the next five
08:03
minutes reading it to you slowly. That's a form of torture in most places, and you don't want to do that. And in fact, I realized that, and this is something I got out of a book I'll point to a little bit later, the book, Presentation Zen by Gar Reynolds, where he talks about there are really two different communication channels. There's a verbal, logical communication
08:24
channel, and there's a much more reactionary kind of emotional information channel. And when you put up a slide with a bunch of bulleted words on it and you're talking, you're overloading one communication channel and starving the other one, which is why it's dull. And so one of the things you want to do is try to balance those two
08:41
communication channels. And in fact, most of the time when you're doing slides for a presentation, they're only half of what you're doing. They shouldn't make sense as a standalone thing. In fact, if they make sense as a standalone thing, you've actually created something other than a presentation, which I'll talk about in just a second. And in fact, this is a couple of the books that I read after I had this kind of epiphany about, you know, we could make
09:04
these things a lot more effective. But I'm a software developer at heart, and both these books were way, way too wishy-washy for me. They were very hand-wavy. They were very good at the theoretical, the things like two channels, like, okay, I get that. And slideology is very good about, you know, picking suitable color wheels for your presentations,
09:23
but there was a huge gap in the middle between this kind of very abstract kind of stuff and this super micro nitty-gritty stuff. And that's really kind of where our book fits in. Now, I'm a technologist at heart. I'm usually in the kind of architect lead kind of role on projects, and I'm really familiar with this concept of patterns and
09:43
anti-patterns. And we really wanted to adapt this for the book because we didn't want to use recipes because recipes have too broad a meaning for what we were trying to do. So let me give you an example of this idea of taking, of kind of applying patterns to everything.
10:05
I, because I'm a technologist, I tend to do this too much. So, for example, and this is the kind of thing that drives my wife crazy. When you go to McDonald's, for example, and you look up on the little lighted screen up above, and you see the number
10:22
one Big Mac, you know, it looks pretty good. I think I'll have one of those. I'll take the Big Mac, please. But then when you get back to your table, you actually get this. And so I made this observation to my wife at some point. Well, the real problem here is the picture you see is the class, and this is an instantiation of the class, and apparently some exception
10:42
happened along the way of creating this thing, this object instance of that pure class. That's the kind of observations I make in the real world, and so it's not surprising that I took that same kind of observation and applied it to things like technical presentations. And we thought about making it a recipe book because recipe books are very popular,
11:00
and we're making this book for a general audience, so we realized that if you're talking to a general audience and you're talking patterns and design patterns, you have to explain the concept to them. But we realized that recipes were really at the wrong level of abstraction because when you think about a recipe, this is how to make a very specific kind of dish. But our
11:21
presentation patterns book is not this specific. There's not a chapter in there about how to do a technical presentation and how to do a keynote and how to do a sales pitch. That's way more broad than what we're talking about. What we're talking about is more analogous to the building blocks that you need to know to be able to make a recipe work. So to be able to
11:40
cook this recipe, you have to know what the word saute means. You have to know tender but firm to the bite, exactly what that means in cooking terms. That's what we're trying to fill in with patterns are these building blocks, and then you can take these and build recipes for here's what a standard kind of technical presentation would look like for your company or yourself, etc. The other reason we really wanted to bring patterns into the picture was that we really,
12:06
really wanted the concept of anti-patterns. And we think this is really important here because almost uniquely among tools, PowerPoint and Keynote give you a whole lot of really handy affordances that almost always make your presentations horrible if you use them. They
12:25
try to encourage you to create what we call bullet-riddled corpses. In fact, it's so accommodating when you create a new slideshow, it'll automatically give you a title in bullets and encourage you to start typing in there. In fact, you can start typing this long list and what happens when you run out of room in the box and hit enter? Both the tools
12:46
will just give you more room to keep typing stuff and just make the font smaller and smaller. That's evil. You should never do that. But the tools encouraging you to do that, that's what we call out as anti-patterns or things you should not do in presentations. And
13:01
in fact, there are quite a lot of these because the tools encourage really bad habits. And so if you look at this slide, that was kind of an epiphany slide for me, this now has what we call the bullet-riddled corpse on it. It's pretty much any slide that has a long series of text with bullets on it. You're not saving any room
13:21
or space by doing this. There's this weird thing at work in most people, it's the law of conservation of slides. It seems like people think that slides are really expensive to create, so they try to cram as much as they can on each slide. Guess what? They're as free as the air. You can create as many of these things as you want, so why are you cramming all these
13:41
things on one slide and forcing the group to sit through this entire thing when I could easily put each idea on one idea per slide and just go through them much more quickly? It's not any harder to do that than it is anything else, any other kinds of visual presentation.
14:02
Here's another example from one of my slides. This is in 2002 at a presentation I did at Comdex. This is a good example of an anti-pattern that we refer to as flood marks. Watermark is just a subtle marker on a page. We call these flood marks. In fact, a lot of conferences, as a speaker, will send you a slide template that we really expect you
14:24
to use. It has their headers and all their sponsors and all that stuff. In 2002, I'd gotten so accustomed to this that I started adding some of my own awful flood marks to the slides because I figure if they're going to add all this junk, I'm going to start adding some of my own junk to it as well. Of course, that's not the right solution. You're much
14:43
better off stripping all that junk away. In fact, you see lots of slides that look like this. This is a terrible slide. In fact, it's terrible in multiple ways. Obviously, it has a little bitty tiny font and it's useless as any kind of presentation format. But it also has this stupid swoopy thing up at the top and this line at the bottom. We
15:05
call those things flood marks, too, because those things are not doing you any favors. Because the stupid swoopy thing up at the top, let's talk about that for a second. So now there's this thing on every slide, and that works okay if you're doing bulleted lists, but what if you need to put an image on the slide now? What are you going to do?
15:22
Do you cover up the swoopy thing and make it inconsistent with all the other slides, or do you squeeze the image down so that you can still see the stupid swoopy thing at the top and the line at the bottom, but now you have this weird white space around the image that you're trying to show, why are you beating me to death with your company logo on every slide? You really don't have to do that. I get it. I know what company
15:45
you're working for. This is okay on the first and last slides, but all you're doing is actually making it worse rather than making it better by making that stuff show up on every single slide. It actually de-emphasizes the things that you want to emphasize rather than emphasize them, because they become common and just kind of sink into the
16:03
background as noise, and that's all it really manifests as, is noise. Nobody ever looks at your company logo and thinks, oh, what a cool logo. They think, why is that in the way of the stuff I'm trying to see? So one of the things that we, the kind
16:21
of design principles that we applied in the presentation patterns book is this thing that I've been calling the jeweler's hammer. It's this idea of taking one big complicated thing and finding a place where you can hit it kind of like a jeweler and have it split into two maybe more valuable pieces. And I think we managed to do that with the separation
16:43
between an infodec versus a presentation. An infodec is something that is designed in a visual tool like Keynote or PowerPoint, just designed to be flipped through quickly. So it's almost like writing a written document in Word but doing it in PowerPoint or something,
17:01
a tool like that instead, versus a presentation which is designed to be projected on a wall and someone stand in front of it to talk about it. And there are several key differences between these things. One of them is that an infodec needs to be comprehensive. There is going to be nobody talking about that infodec, and so it needs to be wholly
17:22
complete in terms of subject matter, because there's going to be no chance to ask questions. This is literally passed around as an email attachment that people can flip through. Versus a presentation, when you build the slides for a presentation, you're really only building half the conversation. The other half, of course, is what you're going to say while that presentation is going on. Another key indicator as to whether you're
17:43
looking at an infodec or a presentation is the presence of animations or transitions. And these terms are kind of loosely defined between the tools that use all these. The way that we use these, in our consistent definition, is that an animation is movement or revelation within a slide. So you just saw an animation right there, something
18:03
that happened within one slide. And then a transition is movement between slides. And most tools give you two different controls for those things. Animation is one, and transitions for the other. And you're about to see a transition right now. And in fact, I'll transition over to the prepare part of our book, which is about
18:24
preparing to do a presentation. This is one of several rubber animatronic guys that we own. And some demon babies, of course. The first pattern we have in our prepare section is know your audience. And this is pretty obvious advice, but this is really critically important because you
18:41
want to get the audience level right. If it's too low, then it's going to be boring. If it's too high, it's going to be really hard to figure out what you're saying. You're going to be over their heads. And you always have to worry about getting a really mixed audience. When I did public training classes, that was always the scariest thing, is getting some rank beginners and some experts in the
19:02
same class. It's not quite as bad if you're doing a conference presentation or something like that. But this is also really critically important if you're doing a presentation about something at work. You're trying to convince someone of a different architectural direction or to use some framework that they haven't used before. You need to know who's going to be in the room so that you know exactly what level you need to pitch that stuff to.
19:24
Another one of the patterns that we talk about in the book in terms of preparation is this idea of the narrative arc of a presentation. This is a really common thing. This has been known in literature forever. This is basically the structure of a story. There's a famous quote by Henry Miller, the
19:41
author, who said that his job is to introduce a protagonist, throw some rocks at him, get him up in a tree, and then get him back down out of the tree. And that's all a fiction. And it's basically this introduction and exposition, build complications, have a climax, a revelation, and then you're done. This is the narrative arc of most literature. But this also applies purely just to storytelling.
20:04
And whether you're doing a technical presentation, a conference, or trying to convince someone at your office, you're telling a story. And if it's a cohesive story, it's going to hang together a lot better. Because people are very, very used to listening to stories. We've been listening to stories since we're
20:21
little tiny children. In fact, stories predate writing in our culture. It's such an important thing. You should leverage that any time you're doing a presentation and have a narrative arc as part of your presentation. And so how does this look for a technical presentation? Because obviously I don't have protagonists and stuff like that. Well, typically what this happens in a technical presentation is you present some sort of
20:43
problem. And then you produce some sort of solution. But it's probably not a complete solution. But that solution generates another problem. You have a solution there. There may be some exposition around, well, maybe you haven't thought about this way to solve the problem. And then that leads to maybe a couple of alternate solutions to problems.
21:01
But this is the narrative arc of a technical talk. Because by the end, you reach some sort of overall solution. This is the point that you're trying to make overall in your talk is that here's the way that we've ultimately solved this problem that I'm trying to put in front of you. And so a lot of ways, you're making the person, the audience, the protagonist. And you're kind of showing them the way
21:20
through this journey that you're trying to lead them on. And so as an example, this is a talk that I did, a technical talk on test-driven, the impacts of test-driven development on design. And what I've done is taken the entire talk and kind of laid it out in terms of the narrative arc. So you can see the first set of slides bring up the general problem.
21:42
And then here's a small solution and then a bigger overall problem, some exposition, and then a problem, solution, problem, solution, kind of back and forth with some exposition added in. And then a general overall summary of the whole thing when all is said and done. So it's worthwhile to spend some time up front to figure out what story you're trying to tell.
22:03
Don't just make a presentation a dull recitation of facts, because it's not going to be very interesting. It needs to come to a climax. There has to be some reason to get to the end of it. And that's exactly what your narrative arc is going to define, is what does that endgame look like. Another common thing that we like to do is have another pattern as a unifying visual theme,
22:25
something that ties all the slides together that is maybe related to the main subject matter in a kind of an interesting orthogonal way, or maybe it's completely unrelated in some way that's kind of interesting in the contrast, the way it's related. Like, for example, Halloween pictures.
22:42
I mentioned that we give a prize for best costume every year. This is the woman who's won it a couple of times now. This is the first year she won it. She came as Tippi Hedren from The Birds, the Alfred Hitchcock movie. This is a phone booth that she made out of cardboard that had a little cardboard phone inside it as well.
23:01
And she walked around all evening with this phone booth on her head with these birds hanging off of it, kind of attacking it. The next year, it was our pirate theme, and she came as buried treasure. This is a brilliant costume. Notice the most brilliant thing about this costume is she thought ahead and installed a straw
23:21
so that she can drink in this costume, because this is a party after all. So she got extra points there for thinking. And this is the woman who won it a couple of years ago. There's a famous chef in the U.S. called Paula Deen, and this woman looks a lot like Paula Deen, so she came as Bert Paula Deen.
23:42
So that's Paula Deen in a casket. Apparently, there was some sort of terrible grease fire in the kitchen and killed her, so that won the best costume prize for that year. She walked around with this coffin around her head for the entire night. In fact, we're trying to start discouraging people from doing installations as costumes, because they're very elaborate, but it's hard to move around, too, so we're starting to have to do that.
24:02
But that's, of course, the unifying visual theme for this talk, is all this Halloween stuff. And it's not just a silly way to show some pictures. There are some studies that show that when you're doing presentations and any kind of public talking, that the attention span for people is about 10 minutes or so,
24:21
and you need to do something out of the ordinary to pull their attention back every 10 minutes or so. And so when I do a keynote, for example, after I finish the keynote, I go back and make sure there are little things in there at about the 10-minute mark that pull people's attention back. This becomes a really nice way to do that, and tie in a nice visual theme.
24:41
And so all of my talks have some sort of visual theme. I have a talk on functional programming. It has chalkboards as the theme. I have a metaprogramming Ruby that does screenshots from The Matrix, because that's what Neo is doing, is metaprogramming the universe when he's doing all these magic things. My Agile Engineering Practices talk has all these engineering feats like bridges.
25:00
And my design patterns in dynamic languages, I ended up using fractals, because they're kind of mathematical, and they're kind of pattern-like. This just gives you a nice kind of anchor point to the presentation as you're going through it. So those are a bunch of preparatory patterns. One of our anti-patterns, when you're talking about preparing a talk,
25:20
is what we call an alienating artifact. One of the ways that you can get people's attention, again, is to do things like, humor is a very good one, a very easy one, but a lot of developers, a lot of presenters, end up getting lazy and decide that sexually racy images and stuff like that is also a great way
25:43
to pull people's attention back. But unfortunately, if you do that, you end up alienating at least some small portion of the audience, and there's no good reason to do that. Just to try to make friends with one part of the audience and alienate the other part is not a good trade-off, and so we always think this is a terrible idea. Even if you think it's the least bit kind of chancy,
26:03
somebody in the audience is gonna think it's crazily chancy and she probably shouldn't do it, and figure out another way to get people's attention without doing something that's gonna alienate part of your audience. I have lots of examples. I wanna ask for an example. There's a bunch of famous examples.
26:21
There was what was called Pron on Rails. There was this presentation done at the Rails Conference a few years ago where it was about, I think it was about one of the database, one of the graph database or something, but it was a bunch of really scantily clad women, and it was something about triple X speed for this database or something like that, and it was just a bunch of semi-pornographic imagery
26:40
at a public conference. It's like, really, you don't need to do that. That's not a good idea. And there's a big, actually about once a year, a big hubbub comes up about this. Two years ago, it was a big Python conference. Somebody did this. This last year recently, it was at some Qualcomm conference. Somebody came on stage and said something crazily insensitive.
27:00
It's not worth trying to bond with some fraternity group of your audience and irritate the rest of them. So another one of our patterns in terms of preparation is what we call forethought, this kind of unusual spelling of four, because one of the mistakes that you make when you're doing a presentation is getting into the presentation tool too early.
27:21
The problem with the presentation tool is it has a very rigid structure. It's a slide. You have a slide, and you have another slide, and then you have a slide after that, and thinking about that too early is going to chop up your thoughts into unnatural pieces. And so we actually spend a lot of time outside the presentation tool before we start building stuff.
27:41
And in fact, we do this pretty much in four pieces. And the first piece of this is generate the idea for the talk. So you come up with an idea. I want to do this talk. I need to do this presentation. I need to pitch this idea to somebody. Spend a little bit of time beforehand. Of course, the more time you can spend, the better off you're going to be. But when I'm in this ideation phase,
28:00
I don't even like things like outlines. I'm a huge fan of things like tree maps because tree maps don't impose linear order on you right away, and they have a really nice capability of not only kind of structure like this, but also these cross-cutting things that you can say, well, this idea really relates to this idea over here.
28:21
And it turns out that when you're putting together a talk, those green arrows are really important because those are connections that you may not have seen in the kind of hierarchical relationship of data, but as a kind of a cross-cutting idea across several ideas. So I spend time, so when I'm thinking about a new talk, what I'll have, I'll create a mind map for it.
28:40
And any time I have an idea that I think even might be closely, anywhere peripherally related to that idea, I go in and just kind of dump it in here. I'm sure a lot of you have seen the Harry Potter movies. Dumbledore had this fantastic thing called a pensive where he could pull thoughts out of his head and kind of shuffle them around. That's what I use mind maps for, is a pen-see for ideas.
29:01
Take my ideas and put them in there, and then when it comes time to actually start putting the talk together, then I come in here and start making some structure and figuring out the way things are related to one another, and then start actually building a proper outline for it. So that's what we refer to as this ideation phase. The capture phase is to capture all this stuff
29:21
in some format that makes sense. I was using mind maps to do that, obviously. The third thing is to organize. Now, at some point, to turn it into a presentation, you've got to get it mashed into an outline. It has to be in a linear format for the presentation itself, because that's the way the talk has to go.
29:42
It's at this point that I actually take the stuff in the mind map and then move it to a proper outlining tool. You can go all the way to the presentation tool now because it has some outlining stuff in it, but I usually take this intermediate step. I actually am literally trying to stay as far away from Keynote and PowerPoint as I can until I absolutely have to go there,
30:00
because once you're there, you never go back. And so you really want to get most of the ideas worked out before you actually start doing it in the tool, and then, of course, get it into the tool. And so I typically take this additional step of getting it into an outline and thinking about the linear relationship of things, and then start putting it into a tool. And actually doing the presentation part of it
30:22
is almost transactional, once you've done all the design work up front. It's much easier to actually just create the slides. And of course, another pretty popular pattern out in the world is lightning talk, and pichacucha, and several different variations that we call that, just the lightning talk pattern,
30:42
and it's a pretty common one out in the world. Next, I want to talk about build. This was the guy who won the Halloween costume contest two years ago. This is Demi Moore from Ghost. He's got a pottery wheel set up there. So this is another one of those installation costumes that we're trying to kind of discourage.
31:04
This actually also shows one of my patterns. You'll notice that the kind of structure of the talk is starting to appear here, and that between major sections, I'm putting a slide that includes my visual theme, and then a nice placeholder. It says, oh, we're at the second part, and we're in the middle. We call these intermezzo slides, or intermezzi slides.
31:22
It's an intermezzo. It's a little break between things. So let's talk about building things, actually building things in a tool like Keynote. And the first one of the anti-patterns I'll talk about is the cookie cutter anti-pattern. This is an easy trap to fall into
31:42
when you're using a tool like Keynote or PowerPoint, presentation tool, particularly when you start the presentation in the tool, because you have this nice unified thing, a slide. And so what you get into this mode of is that, well, all of my ideas should fit on a slide, is that there's a one-to-one correspondence
32:02
between my ideas and slides. The problem with that way of thinking, though, is that some ideas are greater than just one slide. In fact, I would say most ideas are greater than what you can reasonably get onto one slide. And what happens is people try to cram more and more stuff onto one slide
32:21
because they're into this idea of a slide is some sort of unit of work. The only reason it's a unit of work is because of the artifact of the presentation tool, because it makes it obvious when you change from one slide to the other. That's what makes that temporal boundary between two slides. But you can actually make that boundary go away.
32:40
And I'll show you what I mean by that. The point of this is don't allow the tool to alter the message. What you're doing is saying that I only have index cards. I need to write a novel, but all I have are index cards, so I'm gonna write one sentence per index card. Well, you can't even do that because some sentences are gonna be longer than the next card and some are gonna be shorter. It's not a good way to think about
33:01
chunking up your idea size. And I mentioned this before, some of these tools are even worse about this because they actually encourage you to cram more and more and more incomprehensible text on a slide. That auto-size text feature is evil. So let me show you what I mean by this.
33:22
So this is an anti-pattern. This is a bunch of, this is actually an info deck that an old one from ThoughtWorks. And you'll notice when I show this that you see one slide on the screen and then you instantly see another slide on the screen. And then another one, the entire contents are being replaced every time.
33:44
This is what we refer to as a hard transition because one slide just disappears and a brand new slide takes its place with no intervening time period. Of course, this has a bunch of other really nasty anti-patterns on it as well, bullet-riddled corpse and flood marks,
34:00
but it also has this cookie cutter anti-pattern on it. Let me show you an alternative to that. This is from one of my presentation and it uses what I call soft transitions. Soft transitions are transitions between slides that really kind of hide the fact that you're moving from one slide to the other because I'm also using, I'm using dissolve on the slides itself as the animation.
34:21
I'm using a dissolve transition as well. So this is a talk that I do that talks about pulling code apart. It's a refactoring talk. And I show this first piece of code and then I start talking about pulling this code apart in various pieces. So there's one method that I've pulled out. And then another one that I've pulled out and done something with.
34:42
I then talk about the purpose of this refactoring and that what I'm doing is taking something and moving it up in the object hierarchy like that, replacing that, and what that ultimately means that I'm doing is taking this method, moving it up in the hierarchy, and then taking that method and breaking it apart into two different pieces.
35:00
One piece that goes in a parent class, one piece that goes in a child class. And that's the way this presentation goes. Now the question is, how many slides was that that I just went through for that little refactoring exercise? Well it turns out that it was five of them, but who cares? The pace of the slides doesn't really matter.
35:22
You want the message to dictate the flow. And so what you want to do in most cases is hide the transition if you've got an idea that fits more than one slide's worth. Hide the transition by doing a dissolve or movement transition or something like that that hides the fact that you're just replacing one piece of text entirely with another piece of text.
35:43
Now that was a really obvious kind of a set of transitions that I showed you there. And that's probably too overt for like a technical presentation, or sorry, a business presentation. But you can do what we call softer soft transitions. Here's an example of that. So this is actually one from,
36:01
we did it for a client where we're trying to make a case about something. And we're talking about making it stick. And so we have this little visual down here of duct tape, which obviously is very sticky. We need to make several points on this slide. And so we need to make some points about this stuff. But we need to make some more points about making it stick as well. Now we could have crammed more text on here
36:21
and made it smaller and smaller. But what we did was leave the title and the duct tape there and then just started replacing the body again. So now we still have the context of the title and the duct tape, but now we're just replacing the body because we're still talking about the same stuff. And when we finish with talking about that, we're gonna do a transition that makes the two fixed elements go away
36:41
and we'll move to other fixed elements. So having those fixed elements there hides the fact that you're transitioning between slides, just moving things around on slides until you're finished with that thought, and then you can move on to the next thought. So the point of this cookie cutter anti-pattern is that when you use no transitions, it forces this choppy narrative
37:00
because every slide is going to be a unit of thought because it replaces the slide before it completely and irrevocably, whereas using soft transitions, having some transitions between each slide and manipulating those lets you control how big the chunks of information you want to convey are. You know what else is soft?
37:23
Zombies. This is the cake from one of our parties. We've got a fantastic cake baker. Every single piece of this is edible. The worms are edible, they're sugar. That's actually Oreo cookies crumbled up to make the dirt. So the leaves are made out of sugar.
37:42
This is the treasure chest cake from the year that we did the pirate. And all this is edible too. That's actually brown sugar, that's the sand, and all those are all made out of sugar, you know, fondant sugar. And this is actually not a bad example of another one of our patterns,
38:00
what we call vacation photos, which is basically rather than do a formal slide show, just do a bunch of photos and kind of let those be as backdrop. This works really well for people who are not super comfortable with the whole, you know, doing a slide and doing transitions and thinking about that, plus thinking about the contents they want to work on.
38:21
And so that actually ends up being a pretty nice pattern as just basically have some semi-related photos and then have them appear and kind of slowly transition back and forth. So one of the things that we talk about in the build part of our book is this really important chapter on what we call temporal patterns or time-based patterns.
38:43
That's one of the key things that differentiates presentations for things like infodex is the ability to move and control time within the presentation. I already talked about infodex. In fact, I don't have a link here in this talk, but our chief scientist, Martin Fowler, has actually done some really interesting stuff
39:01
on his website of building infodex that are meant to be infodex. He's got one on big data, and he's just released another one. I can't remember what the subject is now, but if you go to Martin Fowler's blog, you start seeing some infodex that he has created. They're not blog entries because they're very visual, kind of like slides, but they're designed to be completely consumed
39:21
by a person sitting at the browser. He's built all this stuff in web-based technologies. And so thinking about these in a different way actually gives you a different medium, this infodex, which is not really a document and not really a slideshow, but kind of a merge between the two of them. I also talked about soft transitions, and I talked about intermezzo or intermezzie slides
39:42
as a nice way to break things up during your presentation. There's another really great pattern called char trail that you're seeing in action right now. What char trail does is as you talk about something, when I move to the next item, it grays out the previous one up before it. This is actually a good example
40:00
that we're not just delineating the tool features between PowerPoint and Keynote in this book because what happened was we ended up figuring out how to do char trail before Keynote supported this by using stacked text boxes and a bunch of pre-wired animations. And then a release came out that actually supported this natively.
40:22
So both PowerPoint and Keynote have started supporting this kind of pattern. This is kind of nice though because it allows you to more easily create slide-uments that don't suck. So let me talk about slide-uments for a second. This is actually a Gar Reynolds term that comes from Presentation Zen. And what he's talking about there
40:41
is trying to create something that works in our terminology as a presentation and info deck at the same time. Something that works as a standalone document and something that you can present from. You should never, ever do that because they're two completely different mediums. And then so trying to do that,
41:01
you're gonna create something that's neither of the proper thing for the medium that you're trying to express it in. But there are some things that you can do to mitigate this if you are forced to do this and char trail is one of these things because what you wanna be able to do is when you print this out, you wanna print it out so that it looks reasonable. So that it's not five pages, one for each bullet,
41:22
but in fact, a page of bullets. But as you're talking about it, you want people to focus on the one that you're talking about and not the things you've just talked about before. That's what's nice about this char trail pattern because it grays out those things as you've talked about them. Still gives you almost a bulleted list kind of thing, but you're only exposing one thing at a time. It's the thing you're talking about right now.
41:42
And it gives you a little bit of context up above as well. So as I said, Gaur Reynolds actually defined this term and we actually call this and as he does too, an anti-pattern in our book because you typically don't want to do this. You really would rather create either a presentation or an info deck because it's hard to create one thing that can serve as both of them.
42:01
But in fact, char trail is something that allows you to do that because this is actually the combination of two different patterns. One that we call exuberant title top and char trail because you'll notice when this slide came in, the title came in as the single thing in the middle and then it moved up to the top then I built in a bunch of cases under that.
42:22
When this prints out, it prints out like this without the grayed out thing so it looks just like a standard bullet list slide but when you do the presentation, there's actually a lot of movement and exposition within it. And so that's what it looks like when it's printed out without the grayed out pieces.
42:41
It prints out just like a regular slide. That's the pattern we call exuberant title top. We've pre-wired a slide that brings up the title in the middle. Actually what it does, this is the tricky thing. This is a really handy little trick that I'll teach you about Keynote and PowerPoint. So the way that we make this exuberant title top thing
43:02
work is that in the designer, we want it to look just like a regular slide with the title at the top and bullets under it so it'll print out that way. So the way that we made this work is that actually when the slide transitions in, the first thing it does is move the title down to the middle and then make it appear and then move it back up to the top.
43:20
The trick to that is that any time in Keynote or PowerPoint when you put an appearance on something, an appearance animation, it'll always make that the first thing but you can move other stuff up before that and the tool's okay with it. So you can move stuff around and do other stuff with it before you make it appear if you want. That's exactly what I'm doing here is the title moves down to the center and then appears
43:42
and then moves back up to the top in a visible way. That allows it to look the same in the designer as the end up slide but then the animations actually take care of the movement when you do the presentation. The point of this is don't create slide units if you can possibly avoid it because you're trying to use a medium
44:00
that's not suited for two different things. You're much better off creating a presentation and an info deck and using them for the right purpose. When you try to cram slides and documents together, it gets kind of creepy. You know what else is creepy? Cockroaches and bathrooms.
44:21
This is our cockroach bathroom. I'm also the proud owner of more than 2,000 rubber cockroaches. So we take over one of our bathrooms. My wife puts different wallpaper on the walls and we have cockroaches. We have cockroaches everywhere. Here's the best thing about this room. We learned this from a professional haunted house.
44:42
We also in this bathroom have a strobe light mounted, actually two of them, so that when you close the door and the regular light goes off, the strobe lights go off and all the cockroaches look like they're moving. It's the coolest thing ever. One of the unanticipated consequences we didn't think about is that we had one cockroach bathroom,
45:01
one rat bathroom, and then one Bates Motel bathroom, but you had to walk through the spider bedroom to get it. There were some people who couldn't use the restroom at our house. They were terrified of all three of our bathrooms, so they had to go to our neighbor's house to use the restroom because they couldn't imagine going to any of the ones that we had in our house. So another really nice pattern
45:21
is this idea of a context keeper. And let me show you an example. This is a combination of a feature in Keynote called Magic Move and this idea of a context keeper. So I do a talk call about building a technology radar. One of the things I talk about during that talk are litmus tests that you need to apply to technologies to decide if you want to choose them or not.
45:41
And the way that I'm keeping it in your head that I'm talking about litmus tests is this context keeper. You'll see this litmus paper actually moves from place to place as I talk about each of these things. That is the consistent element across all these slides. This is that Magic Move transition in Keynote that'll take care of the animation for you to make it move for you like that, that nice smooth movement transition.
46:03
And that's this idea of a context keeper. Now I don't have to have any kind of breadcrumbs or anything like that along the bottom. You know because I have that little context keeper on the slide at all times that's what I'm continuing to talk about. Another related pattern to that is this idea of backtracking.
46:21
And in fact I did this in a slide earlier during my presentation. The idea behind backtracking is that I have an idea and I need to digress for a second to provide some extra context or some sort of extra information. And then I need to get back to the subject I was at before. That's this idea of backtracking.
46:40
Notice in my forethought slide I brought it up. Then I brought up the mind map and then I brought up the same slide again and kept building onto these bullet items for them. That's backtracking. That's purposely putting the same slide in a different place in your presentation so that you can come back to that idea. I didn't move back in my presentation. I planned that to be there because that's part of the structure of the talk.
47:04
Another thing that we rant about pretty long and hard in our presentation patterns book is the difference, it's another jeweler's hammer thing, between demonstrations versus presentations. We further break that down into live demos versus dead demos.
47:20
You see this a lot at technical conferences where people do live coding demos. And sometimes that works really well. In fact, if somebody's a really good live coder, it's a very, very entertaining thing. Venkat Subramaniam is here and he's one of the best in the world at doing that. All his talks is live code all the time. But there are a lot of places where this doesn't work well.
47:41
In fact, watching someone like Venkat do it encourages people who are not very good at doing it to try to do it. It works really well for things like tutorials because people want to see how the pieces fit together. Does not work well for a detailed technical deep dive because you have to type so much to get enough context before you can get anything going.
48:00
It works well for product demos. It does not work well if you've got all this tool interaction that you're having to do that 80% of it is not really related to what you're trying to talk about but you're just trying to get stuff set up and running. It works really well for hands-on classes. It works really terribly for time-consuming tasks. In fact, one of the things that trips people up
48:20
is that you type all day and you think, oh, I'm a great typist. And then you decide, well, I'm gonna do some live coding as part of this conference presentation. Well, you get up on stage and all of a sudden, 50 people are watching you. That makes you nervous. And so what's the first thing you do when you get nervous? Oh, this is taking too long. I need to speed up. What happens when you speed up? You start making mistakes, which just makes you that much more nervous,
48:40
which makes you speed up even more, which makes it even worse. So I tell people, I will gladly watch you live code if you are confident enough to let me remove your backspace key. Because that's the thing that I see more often than not during live coding is the application of the backspace key. I think that key is hit more than any other key during live coding because people get in a hurry
49:03
and they're constantly trying to make corrections, et cetera. There are better ways to do this in a lot of cases. And we have several different patterns in our book that talk about this. And one of them is this idea of traveling highlights where you actually show code highlight, a syntax highlighted as if it came from an IDE,
49:20
but this is just a screenshot of code from an IDE. And I can do things like overlay. I actually selected this text and then captured the screenshot and now I have that highlighted text. We also have this pattern called traveling highlights. It looks like this. So I wanna talk about some code and I wanna talk about the first line first and then I wanna talk about another line
49:41
and then some other stuff. All this is is a screenshot of code with one line highlighted and then dissolve in another screenshot on top of it with another line of code highlighted and you get this traveling highlights kind of effect. Here's another trick. This one actually does, I think, both traveling highlights like that. It also does a thing that we call opacity shift
50:02
where you basically make everything much more faded out except the things that you're specifically talking about. This is actually really pretty but you have to be super careful because the projector you're using has to have good contrast to make this even show up. In fact, in a lot of projectors, this won't even show up
50:20
that you've done this opacity shift. So one of the things that you might wanna put in your toolbox, if you go to presentationpatterns.com, there is a slide deck you can download. It's for both Keynote and PowerPoint. We call it the Presentation Patterns Projector Sanity Test slide deck. Before you do a presentation anywhere, run this deck, it'll tell you if everything's aligned, it'll tell you if all the color cables are working,
50:42
it'll tell you if you have dead pixels, it'll tell you what the opacity looks like on all these things and so it's a way to vet the projector before you actually start doing a talk. I ran it in here before I did this presentation to make sure that everything looked okay and that the contrast was actually good enough to be able to do this opacity shift thing.
51:00
You can also do some really cool things in a presentation tool that you just literally can't do in an IDE. So one of the points I wanna make in one of my talks is how similar these two chunks of code are and I can talk about that until I'm blue in the face but since I'm in a presentation tool, what I don't just demonstrate how similar they are to one another
51:21
by overlaying them on top of one another. You can't do this inside an IDE and developers make the mistake of, because I spend all my day in the IDE, everybody wants to see things happening in the IDE but they don't. They like the color coding and all the other affordances the IDE gives but you don't have to see it in the IDE to believe that it's true.
51:41
Here's the other really nice thing, another pattern that we came up with. This is from one of Matthew's talks where this is a tool about open source debugging tools in Java. One of the most likely things that will ever happen at a conference, is you go to your room that has reasonably okay internet
52:00
and you run your demo 50 times and it works great and then you get it into the conference center where everybody's using the conference Wi-Fi and it fails. That's way too risky for me. What I'd much rather do rather than do a demo live like this is use a pattern that we call lip sync.
52:20
What we did was I videotaped this, interacting with it and now I've just embedded the video directly on my slide. The nice thing about this is if I'm trying to demonstrate something, I know it's gonna work. I'm not stressed about this working now because the internet's working because I know it worked when I filmed it. Now I can talk about it as it's happening. I don't have to concentrate on typing and making all this stuff work
52:41
and speaking to you at the same time. I can talk about all the things that are going on here. In fact, in this presentation, the tool usage that I was showing you there when Matthew did it from scratch, it took 19 minutes and 30 seconds. After he lip synced it and recorded it, he could speed up the parts of all the servers starting up and all that stuff that nobody really cared about.
53:01
He got that part of the demo down to a minute and 30 seconds. He saved 18 minutes of his presentation and what that allowed him to do was cover a lot more information because now he has 18 minutes worth of more stuff to cover. That's one of the side effects of things like live demonstrations and live coding is you're cutting down
53:21
on the amount of material you can present because you're making people watch you do all this setup and all this preparatory work whereas you can actually do that offline if you want to. In fact, the inspiration, we almost call this pattern but it's too much of a cultural reference. Does anybody remember Milli Vanilli? This is a pop band in the 90s
53:41
that got busted for lip syncing and the reason we wanted to call it that and in fact, the first time I ever saw this pattern manifest was at a Borland Conference back in the early 2000s. They had this brand new technology hot off the presses that and I'm not going to try to get into why anybody would want to do this
54:01
but it would allow you to make com calls into Corba objects using, sorry, com calls into RMI using Corba. So it was every middleware technology on earth trying to talk to one another and so they had this big demo planned for Monday morning and the guy tried it and it failed.
54:22
So Tuesday they tried the big demo and it failed and Wednesday they tried it and it failed and basically the president of the company came to the guy and said, we got one more chance at this demo, you're going to make it work or you're probably going to get fired and this guy was in a panic because this technology literally would work five times and then fail
54:41
and it would work six times and fail and then fail and then work twice and fail and so what he did was in the room overnight was one of the times that it worked, he videotaped it and it did that as the live demo on stage but didn't tell anybody that he was doing that and in fact it was a little bit chance because at one point he was acting like he was typing and got out of the extreme. Now tell us what you're doing there.
55:00
He's like, no, no, I can't hurry because he couldn't stop acting like he was typing because he had this video running. We actually told him, you shouldn't have been ashamed about that, you should have embraced the fact that that's your solution to the problem because it was a really good solution to the problem because he could demonstrate what worked which is what everybody wanted to see, not all the crashing and all that other stuff
55:20
which nobody cared about because that was gonna be gone in six months because the thing would be ready. He wanted to show it actually working and by doing the lip sync pattern, he was able to do that. One of the things you may notice during the course of this talk is that every once in a while, all the slides go away and if you go to a place like Toastmasters
55:43
or Speak Right or some organization like that that specialize in public speaking, they will tell you, you should never use slides because slides distract away from you. They should be paying attention to you as the speaker. I say, that's wrong. What you should do is plan when you want people to pay attention to you
56:02
and put blank slides in because that does exactly what you want. When you bring up a blank slide, there's nothing else to look at except me. So if I want you all to focus back on me, I just make all that go away. In fact, one of the things that we try to get away from is this idea of stale content. Don't leave content up and then start talking about something completely unrelated
56:21
because now your backdrop is lying. You're much better off just transition that to a blank slide, start into your next subject matter and then start building slides on top of that. Our last pattern is deliver and I'll just talk about a few of these. One of these are hiccup words.
56:40
This is why you want to videotape yourself doing a presentation at some point because you have hiccup words. These are words that you use all the time that you don't realize you're using all the time until you watch yourself in video and then you're appalled. So Stuart Holloway, who many of you have seen, his hiccup word is right. He ends every sentence with right.
57:01
I noticed David Nolan this morning has started doing the same thing and I think it's called Rich Hickey does that. So everybody that watches Rich or hangs out with Rich all the time picks up that little verbal tick. Rich may have actually gotten it from Stu because Stu's hiccup word of right actually predates Rich's use of it. So there's a little bit of cross pollination going on there in the closure community
57:20
around that particular hiccup word. I can tell you what mine is, is the word actually. When I get nervous or if I don't know exactly what to say, I'll start putting in actually over and over and it's a bad thing but I never notice it until I see myself on tape and then you notice it right away. That's why you need to videotape yourself because you have all these weird little ticks
57:40
and things that you don't realize you're doing until you see yourself on tape. That's also the hardest thing to do is learn to watch yourself. It's very hard. Another one of our anti-patterns is what we call going meta. Don't ever talk about your talk before your talk. So this happened at a conference in Sweden actually
58:01
and as you probably know, Scandinavians have a worldwide reputation for being very, very quiet as an audience. And so really well-known guy got up to do this keynote and the very first thing he said was, normally this keynote's an hour and 15 minutes long but I've only got an hour but I'll try to hurry and get through it.
58:22
And he finished in 15 minutes, the whole thing. And everybody was irritated because now they feel like they got ripped off because now he said, well, it's an hour and 15 minute talk, I'll rush through it and he finished early and it's like, well, I want some more stuff. Whereas if he hadn't said anything, he would have imperfect because he would have finished with 10 minutes left
58:40
for question and answer and it would have been perfect. Going meta never works out well. So never start your talk by saying, oh, I was up until 3 a.m. working on this talk. Nobody cares. They care about what it says, not all the details around it that you may think is really interesting. Turns out it's not. And that kind of goes to another pattern that we talk about.
59:01
One of the really common things for technical talks is do them once or twice and then you're done with them forever. But we actually plan to do talks a lot and that means that we put a lot more effort to them up front and we never stop improving them. I keep tweaking my talks. I have some talks that are multiple years old but every time I do them, I think about
59:21
how can I tweak this to make it a little bit better? Here's a really nice trick for that. It's a really common thing to be during a presentation that you've done a few times before and a slide comes up and it's like, oh, I don't like the slide here. I really need to swap these two or change the wording. But then when the talk's over, it's like, yeah, I remember two or three things that I wasn't crazy about and now I can't remember what they were.
59:41
The trick is take your phone with a recorder app and as you're doing the talk, when you come up on one of those little places, just hit the recorder and record like 10 seconds worth of context. When you're done, play those back and that'll tell you exactly where you were in the talk and that'll remind you, oh, yeah, I want to change that thing and make it better.
01:00:01
Another one of our patterns is this idea of Carnegie Hall that you want to practice, practice, practice. In fact, we say that you should practice a brand new talk four times before you do it for real. You should do it once for content and pacing, once for presentation stuff, does the presentation pieces work together, once for content and presentation fixes and home material,
01:00:21
and then the fourth time, you should try to get it in a groove and make sure it works exactly the way that you want it to work.