My Open Source Debugging talk that I gave at JavaZone, Oslo, Norway last September is online and can be watched in Flash format or downloaded as an M4V file. If you were not able to catch this talk at either this venue, or any of the many NoFluffJustStuff.com stops that I gave this talk at last year, give it a try and let me know what you think of it.
Fonts, fonts, fonts. What’s this obsession? For those of us that share a passion for making presentation materials as comprehensible as possible for our students, sandwiched right between a great story and great delivery is a great font.
Once you’ve installed Microsoft Office, iWork, or Open Office, you’ll find that you’ve been granted a few (or possibly many) extra fonts installed into your operating system. This is a temptation you should approach carefully, just as you would the edge of a cliff. It is truly a time and design precipice you can fall off of into the abyss.
As you gradually approach this list of fonts, if you obsess over design like I do, you’ll let out an “Ooooooo” as if mesmerized by the quantity of selections you could make. A tool would be perfect here. Let me grant your wish with FontDoc for the Mac and WinFontsView for Windows.
Now, you have a tool to whittle that list of massive fonts down to size. Let me give you two facets that will chisel it down even further.
First, use a maximum of two Font Faces per presentation. I’ll allow for three if you make judicious use of a handwriting font.
One font should be interesting and story-relevant. It should mesh well with your photography and choice of color in the slides. I’d suggest you primarily use it for titles, strong statements and short phrases. It adds spice to your presentation. Feel the freedom to have fun with your title fonts. I’ve recently styled a presentation on Hadoop with an African theme. I used the Tribeca font in the title and custom rhinoceroses for the bullet points (yes, I used some bullets).
The second (primary) font should be highly legible. I can’t stress that enough. For the portions of your slide deck that people will need to read (and quickly, so they can return mental focus to you), readability is the critical point. I always suggest sticking with a very legible Sans Serif font, as does Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen Design.
I don’t always obey this rule of Sans Serif in the body, sometimes to my own peril. Fortunately, local audiences in Denver are kind, and remind me that I need to change it back.
Hello Verdana. Really, I didn’t mean to cheat on you! It was just that Aquiline showed up looking so stylish and I just couldn’t help it.
The short list of Sans Serif fonts that I printed and put across the room is:
I’d suggest you do the same. Also put them up on a projector if you have access to one. Do white font on black. Do black font on white. Notice the affect each font’s nuances have on legibility. Throw up some ranking numbers next to each. That’s precisely what I did. And I asked a few folks to give me their rankings too.
The variant that I (and my scientifically font-polled friends) love the most, is Helvetica Neue. The beautiful part is that it comes preinstalled on many systems these days, but can also be purchased online if you are on a OS or office suite that doesn’t include it.
In the life of a font, you know you’ve arrived when a movie is made about you. Yes, a biographical movie about Helvetica, the font named after Switzerland’s classical name.
Lest you think this is a factor of Steve Jobs and his Apple design shop, I’ll let you in on the secret that this predates the personal computer by several decades. Max Miedinger was the designer behind this font all the way back in 1958!
Give any of these Sans Serif fonts a try (but lean towards Helvetica!) in your next presentation and be sure to gather design feedback from your audience. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!
Shameless plug: Keep an eye out in 2010 for the Presentation Patterns book from Neal Ford, Matthew McCullough and Nate Schutta for a complete recipe book with easily digestible presentation improvement hors d’oeuvres like this one.
I had the pleasure of hanging out with about 60 of my local friends at the Denver Java Users Group (DJUG to the locals) on Wednesday night and talking about Encryption on the JVM as well as Hadoop. I had the good fortune of having Andy Sautins of Returnpath.net, who’s an active user of Hadoop, field a few of the questions. I really appreciate the time a few of the folks spent giving me feedback on Speakerrate.com. For your future reference, below are the slides and sample source. Feedback and suggestions are always welcome at matthewm@ambientideas.com
Does your application transmit customer information? Are there fields of sensitive customer data stored in your DB? Can your application be used on insecure networks? If so, you need a working knowledge of encryption and how to leverage Open Source APIs and libraries to make securing your data as easy as possible. Encryption is quickly becoming a developer’s new frontier of responsibility in many data-centric applications.
In today’s data-sensitive and news-sensationalizing world, don’t become the next headline by an inadvertent release of private customer or company data. Secure your persisted, transmitted and in-memory data and learn the terminology you’ll need to navigate the ecosystem of symmetric and public/private key encryption.
Moore’s law has finally hit the wall and CPU speeds have actually decreased in the last few years. The industry is reacting with hardware with an ever-growing number of cores and software that can leverage “grids” of distributed, often commodity, computing resources. But how is a traditional Java developer supposed to easily take advantage of this revolution? The answer is the Apache Hadoop family of projects. Hadoop is a suite of Open Source APIs at the forefront of this grid computing revolution and is considered the absolute gold standard for the divide-and-conquer model of distributed problem crunching. The well-travelled Apache Hadoop framework is currently being leveraged in production by prominent names such as Yahoo, IBM, Amazon, Adobe, AOL, Facebook and Hulu just to name a few.
In this session, you’ll start by learning the vocabulary unique to the distributed computing space. Next, we’ll discover how to shape a problem and processing to fit the Hadoop MapReduce framework. We’ll then examine the incredible auto-replicating, redundant and self-healing HDFS filesystem. Finally, we’ll fire up several Hadoop nodes and watch our calculation process get devoured live by our Hadoop grid. At this talk’s conclusion, you’ll feel equipped to take on any massive data set and processing your employer can throw at you with absolute ease.
I’m very excited to announce I’ve been selected to present at the Great Indian Developers Summit in Bangalore, India in April. I just found out that my NFJS colleagues, Scott Davis and Venkat Subramaniam will be joining me there as well. It will be great to have familiar faces at this venue and to present to such a distinguished audience.
This is a tidbit of insight about my radically revised techniques for assembling complex compelling presentations this year. I’m certain it will create a widely varied set of comments and feedback.
Earlier this year, Neal Ford, Nate Schutta and I were driving from the Des Moines No Fluff Just Stuff show in the pouring rain. Pouring hard enough to stop a dashboard GPS device from working. Hard enough to stop all outbound flights from the airport. Hard enough to cause us to lightly hydroplane. In short, a normal NFJS weekend.
This fury of nature would not deter us from our technical discussions and the subject of presentations with large quantities of moving parts came up. I said that “for a certain set of presentation demos that contain around 5 or more interwoven components — not JAR dependencies mind you — keeping this operational for the course of a year of presenting was more work than building it in the first place and highly crash prone.” We debated aggressively, but Neal interjected at one point and said “You should just try it.” And thus, I did.
Neal, Nate and I have a project that we’ll be able to tell you more about soon. Related to this project, we’re attempting to give names to these presentation patterns and anti-patterns. For example, Neal dubbed the above discussion’s output the “Lipsync Pattern.“
In terms of tooling, I’ve become very attached to Screenflow 2.0. I previously used iShowU HD, but its capabilities are now far exceeded by Screenflow in terms of seamlessly stitching together multiple pieces of footage in a meaningful way.
Feedback from this technique for my Open Source Debugging talks have been overwhelmingly positive. Some examples are:
“Thanks for giving the great talk on open source debugging tools last night at BJUG. Specifically the part where you “played through” the typing/console. It sort of reminded me of prezi.com, with the way you were able to zoom into sections of slides, seemingly capture keyboard input, etc. Loved it.”
and another really captures the essence of why I feel this is a meaningful way of teaching:
“I liked that you used a recorded version vs. live coding. I felt like you were able to explain things better than other presenters I’ve seen who try and field questions while coding live. Also the spotlighting and highlighting really helped the flow.”
When using this approach, I’ve found, through the feedback of friends like Scott Davis, that it’s best to exaggerate the fact that you are not live coding. Joke about it. And lastly, make it a positive trade by discussing what’s happening in the playback in a dialogue with the audience.
I’m becoming so jaded that I (internal voice, not external) am having a hard time watching some live coding speakers now. It’s often swordplay showmanship on the level of Errol Flynn. It has nothing to do with teaching. And it usually bombs, at least in a minor way, somewhere, and we spend 2 minutes watching the speaker “clean it up.”
I hear that there’s going to be a “Presentation Patterns and Anti-Patterns” book with Neal’s name on it. Based on my positive experience, I can only say, “the sooner the better Neal.”
I’m counting down right along with the TSS staff until October 27th where I’ll have the great opportunity to share my OSS Debugging talk with the developers gathered in Prague, Czech Republic. My Denver acquaintance, Tim Berglund will also be coming along to share the right way to be Agile in your Database with Liquibase. Join us for two days of development insights, tools, techniques and one on one time with the speakers.
Of all the cities I’ve presented in this year for both NFJS, private training, and user groups, two stand out so far as real gems: Minneapolis and Denver. The audiences are highly engaged and ask challenging questions. This is both scary and energizing as a presenter. You are being asked to call on not just your prepared slides, but your experience and catalog of knowledge to come up with a relevant answer. Sometimes, the audience will even help you with the answers, like on the defaults for Objective-C’s @property. It turns out, the answer is: atomic. Thanks Johnny Wey!
Sometimes things just don’t go perfectly in the open source world. There are times where it seems like a dot release cures many things, but then breaks/regresses several important ones as well. Like the XML parsing in the iPhone demo. Turns out, it was a Grails 1.1 issue (which I upgraded to from 1.0.3 to solve another bug) in which optional URL parameters are wrongly required. Grails 1.1.1 fixes it, which I validated at 11pm last night, but it would have been fun to live fix this with the audience. This reinforces the point in my talk though that you should always check your web services, possibly using curl, or SOAPui prior to connecting your iPhone application to them.
It’s amazing to see how many of the presenters and audience members are on Twitter and posting their experiences about the conference. That’s a real change from last year, where hardly anyone was live posting in that fashion. I hope to see you all again in the Fall at the next Denver NFJS, loaded with more difficult questions and an inquiring state of mind.
Tonight was the Denver Open Source User’s Group March meeting.
First up was Clark Hobbie on the CLIP IPC Library.
First, Clark addressed the question,”Why do we need an IPC library?” . He purports you need IPC “anytime you access something outside your JVM and need to share it in a controlled and coordinated manner with another client”. Clark says that CLIP was created as an answer to the cryptic and verbose shared memory classes in the JDK.
A brief outline of what he covered in his slides is as follows:
Clark did a great job on his slides with funny anecdotes, images for analogies, and clear verbal examples of IPC types (props to World of Warcraft).
Talend ETL Tool
Second up was Tim Berglund speaking on the open source Talend Open Studio ETL (Extract Transform and Load) system. This French startup company is attempting to create a new price point for ETL tools with the now-common OSS business model, selling support and training while giving away the core product for free.
He neatly said this is a talk for non-DBAs but rather developers that need to work with databases. Tim admitted that there are a few negatives to the otherwise great Talend tool. Those are: the JAR is 70MB, the error messages have a French accent, and Mac Eclipse support is a work in progress.
The visual designer has a lot of off-the-shelf transforms. We also saw XML, Excel files, 10+ DB brands, and CSVs as just some of the data sources.
It was a fun set of slides that were in the vein of Slideology.
Based on some Twitter conversations with @fredjean about the Codex Ruby Gem, I’ve been inspired to stop taking screenshots of code for slides and rather putting in formatted text. But this isn’t as easy to do as it should be. Eclipse 3.4 has lost (for me, and others) the ability to copy and paste rich text so that it appears formatted in the paste destination. Maybe that’s a MacOS failure of later Eclipse versions. No matter though, as I drift father from Eclipse usage. My favorite other two editors can fulfill this need nicely with two simple add-ons.
Jim Weirich’s blog post about using Ruby and posting source as a means
Dave Thomas (@pragdave) chimes in with his similar thread about presenting code — gasp — without Keynote entire.
This sweet plugin lets you copy formatted code of any language TextMate recognizes as RTF. Perfectly suitable for pasting into MS Word, Pages, TextEdit, or namely, Keynote. Install it via:
cd ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles
git clone git://github.com/drnic/copy-as-rtf-tmbundle.git “Copy as RTF.tmbundle”
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/mccm06/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/Copy as RTF.tmbundle/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 34, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (17/17), done.
remote: Total 34 (delta 14), reused 34 (delta 14)
Receiving objects: 100% (34/34), 6.88 KiB, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (14/14), done.
The copy:
And the paste:
Similar functionality works from IntelliJ. Just install the plugin “Copy to Clipboard as HTML”.
The copy:
And, the paste:
I just finished watching several excellent presenters from a summary page of 10 video clips. Everyone should consider watching these to improve their talks in 2009. These are the superstars of this skillset and there’s so much to be learned from them.