Speaking tonight at UDFUG
Its last minute, but I’ll be sharing the meeting with friend, cohort, and UDFUG manager John Lindquist. I’ll try and take up 45 minutes talking about AIR windows ( NativeWindow stuff really ) and some fun toys I’ve made. There will also be a fun little announcement at the meeting ( more on that later ).
I think one of the toughest parts of presenting is knowing what your audience already knows. I’m always afraid I’m covering material everyone is already well aware of. If anyone reading has any suggestions for going about this I’d love to hear. I’ve been writing the AIR Bible for a few months now and am finding the task of delivering content that is useful to both advanced and beginner developers at the same time to be highly challenging. I personally prefer to read something that is a little over my head, I can always re-read it and do the required research and experimentation to try and catch up, but I really don’t like textbooks that offer little to nothing that isn’t obvious. I once picked up a C# textbook and was rather disappointed that it spent a whole chapter on Arrays. I don’t blame the authors really, its really tough to know who your audience is, and there doesn’t seem to be a very obvious way of separating programming basics from the nature of a specific language or platform.
I’ll continue on with my struggle to deliver good material for all, but again would love to hear feedback on the subject, thanks in advance!
January 17th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
i definitely think the best presentations are those that inspire and motivate me to go learn more. that said, not a lot of developers get to work on client projects using AIR, so i think it doesn’t hurt to cover some basics like what libraries to use, and the practical details how to start out doing cool things with native windows.
for me, the most annoying presentations are the ones where the presenter spends the first five minutes talking about their dog, the next 40 on basic basics, and only gets to the cool stuff at the end in a rushed way. i think if you can avoid that, you’re good