For the rest in the posts in this series please see the series index.
So today marks the first full day on this presentation, yesterday I only invested about 4 hours work into the solution. Most of today was spent on building the reference for my demo’s. This is a functioning demo system that includes many ideas and concepts and is something I build on. This code won’t be the actual demo code because once I have this I can break it down and build my actual demo’s off it.
The reference demo gives me an opportunity to take my ideas, try them out, learn a lot about the issues and enables me to cherry pick scenarios for actual demos. For this presentation the core idea for my demo’s is working what prime numbers are there below a specified ceiling number. To start I coded the solution without any threading, then figured out various different ways of using threads and thread pools to enable threading.
Coding demo’s away in Visual Studio 2010
Once I had those first few done, I went back to the slide deck and started thinking about the order of the slides, where I want demo’s and what the flow will be and finally there is also a bit of cleanup of the slides. One of the things is that this is a process, and so changes occur. Some are small but have big impact like changing the title from Threading to Multi-Threading because that reflects the core theme better and will help people decide if they want to be attend the session. Some may seem more radical, like dropping a few ideas from this already because as the timing and theme seep out they do not fit well anymore. This is to be expected – a lot of this creative work is destructive and this screen shot of the slides at the end of the day, doesn’t tell you how many slides I created to just delete 15min later.
This brings me to another tip, which is always find out when the last possible date is to submit the title and description for your session is. Often your original presentation title/description will change and being stuck with the old ones will either force you down the wrong path or will annoy your audience when they arrive to find the session is not what they expect.
The slides at the end of day 2 – those on the bottom row are in danger of “being voted off the island”, but I am trying to hold on to them because they look so good.