Presentation Fu

I’ve attended my fair share of conferences this month alone, plus a Seedcamp, and I can safely say that in any way, I learned a lot about how to build slides, how to keep the audience engaged and things one just shouldn’t do in a talk or in slides. While I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on the topic now, I just wanted to put all of my impressions and lessons learned into a post.

June - A Month of Conferences

June was an exhausting month for me. I spoke at four different conferences, two of which were not in Berlin. I finished the last talk today, so time to reciprocate on conferences and talks. In all I had good fun. It was a lot of work to get the presentations done (around 400 single slides altogether), but in all I would dare say that it was all more than good practice to work on my presentation skills and to loose a bit of the fear of talking in front of people. But I’ll follow up on that stuff in particular in a later post.

Upcoming Conference Talks

June is a busy month when it comes to me speaking at conferences, you should drop by at least one of my talks, if you’re in the area.

Conference Talks You Should Be Watching

Thanks to the guys from Confreaks, there’s a whole bunch of video material from conferences for the rest of us to enjoy. I’ve been watching quite a few recently, so here’s some recommendations of talks I found interesting.

ActiveRecord’s Callbacks Ruined My Life

Recently I’ve been having a foul taste in my mouth, or just a bad feeling, if you will. Whenever I started adding validations and callbacks to a model in a Rails application. It just felt wrong. It felt like I’m adding code that shouldn’t be there, that makes everything a lot more complicated, and turns explicit into implicit code. Code that is only being run depending on the persistence state of an object. Code that is being hard to test, because you need to save an object to test parts of your business logic. Don’t get me started on observers, I never was a fan of them. Putting stuff that should be run when an object was saved elsewhere is the worst kind of hiding business logic.