During one of the conferences a couple of years back in Bangalore after an hour and half of my talk(!!!) on Flex MVC, one of the organizers quipped, “Oh, this is not a presentation, it’s a workshop”, much to my dismay. It amuses me everytime, when the organizers ask to follow a particular format and design in their slides, when you want to scream, “I’m not going to use slides at all”
To all the clients that have interacted with me before a training programme, there are few points that I have always emphasized.
- I’m not a power point guy. Will not bore you, by running you through presentations
- Will make you code so much, that after the training, you can get started working with your project comfortably.
- If you’re not interested in coding, don’t attend my training
It makes me wonder how you can talk about Flex MVC for one and half hours without writing even single line of code. Technical trainings/talks/code workshop or whatever one chooses to call, will be a snoozefest if you keep showing slides for more than five minutes.
Slides are best used to show pictures, diagrams or animations to explain a concept even better. Showing code in a slide is another useless routine.
Even if you aren’t interested in seeing code in a technical talk, you’re bound to get exhausted just by seeing slides that pop in lines and lines of text with some weird animations.
A lot of top notch technical speakers/trainers that I have interacted with, it doesn’t matter you call the event a training or workshop because they know only way of deliveing a technical lecture, by writing code. They make the talks interesting by playing with number of tools, languages and of course, by writing high quality code.
Somebody had said long before, “Code speaks more than words”