Ambient Ideas' Denver Dev » Presenting

A Set of Exciting Conferences

Matthew McCullough — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 21:42:46 +0000

I’m enjoying the privilege of being invited to several large conferences across the globe in 2010. Let me give you a brief overview of these exciting just-attended and upcoming venues…

Scandinavian Developer Conference

I just wrapped up giving my well heeled Open Source Debugging for Java talk to the wonderful folks at the 2010 Scandinavian Developer Conference in Göteborg, Sweden. Tomas and Lennart were the most wonderful conference hosts and the speaker dinner was world class. The conference was around 700 strong this year, which broke through expectations of growth from 2009. That showcases what a polished event Iptor hosts.

Many stateside colleagues joined me on this trip, including Tim Berglund, Paul Rayner, and Nate Scutta.

Great Indian Developer Summit

Next, I’m looking forward to the Great Indian Developer’s Summit in just a few short days from now. I’ll be speaking on a range of topics from iPhone Development for Java Programmers all the way to Dividing and Conquering large datasets with Hadoop. I’ve already been impressed by the helpfulness of the Saltmarch hosts, Usha Karen and Dilip Thomas.

Epicenter

In June, I’ve been invited to the green landscape of Dublin, Ireland to present at Epicenter. I’ll be speaking on iPhone development for Java Programmers once again (a topic I’m passionate and knowledgeable about) in addition to Encryption on the JVM.

UberConf

Just one day after returning from Epicenter, I’ll be speaking for four days in my hometown of Denver, Colorado at the newly minted UberConf. It will be a weekday show with a very unique pre-conference workshop (boot camp) on iPad Development for Java Developers. Ben Ellingson will be co-teaching this class with me.

There will be over 100 sessions at this unique conference, which is scale-tipping for an NFJS branded event. There are even registration levels that are all-inclusive, which works great for some corporately sponsored attendees. These unique (and quite successful) packages bundle travel, hotel, meals, registration, and an iPad. You’ll know your exact costs before you even take one step towards an airport.

No Fluff Just Stuff Series

And lastly, I’ll continue to present at my favorite recurring conference series, the No Fluff Just Stuff tour. There are at least 15 more stops on the tour this year and I hope to hit most of them. I’m looking forward to meeting up with a lot of the audience members that I had delicious breakfasts, lunches and dinners with in 2009 in the cities where the tour visits.

DOSUG Ignite Talks, Speaker Videos

Matthew McCullough — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 20:02:42 +0000

The Denver Open Source Users Group held an O’Reilly Ignite night in February. We are thankful for Paul Rayner’s volunteering to run the video camera. I’ve just begun stitching the videos together with the animated slides, which turns out to be no easy task. Thank goodness for ScreenFlow. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to assemble a composite video and align the timing without this amazing product. Tom O’Brien, Paul Rayner and Tim Berglund are all now onboard with this amazing and award winning piece of software.

The result of the first stitch of my PresentationPatterns.com talk, entitled “Information Alchemy for Better Presentations” can now be seen on YouTube in HD.

JavaZone 2009 Open Source Debugging Talk

Matthew McCullough — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:19:47 +0000

Open Source Debugging in Norway

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.

What’s the big deal about font choices in presentations?

Matthew McCullough — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:15:27 +0000

Fonts and Presentations

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.

Reviewing the list

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.

Title versus Body

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 finalists

The short list of Sans Serif fonts that I printed and put across the room is:

Agenda
Arial
Bitstream
Calibri
Century Gothic
Franklin Gothic
Futura
Geneva
Gill Sans
Helvetica
Optima
Heiti
Trebuchet
Verdana

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 winner

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!

Conclusion

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.

Denver JUG Hadoop and Encryption Presentations

Matthew McCullough — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:38:55 +0000

Denver JUG January Meeting

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

Encryption Bootcamp on the JVM

Abstract

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.

Source code samples on GitHub
Slides

View more documents from Matthew McCullough.

Intro to Hadoop

Abstract

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.

Source code samples on GitHub
Slides

View more documents from Matthew McCullough.

Presenting at the Great Indian Developers Summit

Matthew McCullough — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:15:32 +0000

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.

Recorded Presentations – The “Lipsync” Pattern

Matthew McCullough — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:56:18 +0000

Presentation Recording, The Origins

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.“

Recording Tools

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

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.”

Applying this Technique

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.

Summary

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.”

Speaking at TSS Europe

Matthew McCullough — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 06:58:29 +0000

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.

Maven, OSS and iPhone: The Denver NFJS Audience Rocks

Matthew McCullough — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:45:47 +0000

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.

IPC and Talend at the DOSUG March Meeting

Matthew McCullough — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 02:50:05 +0000

Tonight was the Denver Open Source User’s Group March meeting.

CLIP IPC Library

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:

What is useful about IPC?
When to use different IPC options
The example applications
The CLIP library
Shared Memory
Semaphores
Shared Queues
Resources
Where to get the slides
Other useful sites, etc.

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.