http://ayende.comAyende @ RahienCopyright (C) Ayende Rahien 2004 - 2021 (c) 202660Thought both your sessions on ActiveRecord and Quality Software was great. Rhino Mocks was good but my brain was full at that time ;) Waiting on video from the Panel Debate to be published, my co-worker thought it was one of the best things he attended http://ayende.com/3720/presentation-styles#comment4http://ayende.com/3720/presentation-styles#comment4Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:18:19 GMTI completely agree with your points about the challenges of ensuring the right content/topic/focus/approach for the group that actually shows up for your presentation. All too often I get attendees that show up to a deep-dive talk that have just a passing curiosity about the topic or to a high-level overview presentation when they have been using the technology/practice/whatever for several months themselves already. When this happens, I find that you have two choices: 1) give the presntation you planned anyway and waste everyone's time or 2) dynamically retool your presentation to match the attendees, thus wasting YOUR time but not the entire audience's :D I usually try to have slides in my deck and code in my samples that can handle either case so that I can reset my presentation to reflect the character of the attendees, but as you point out quite correctly, this is a VERY difficult thing to balance correctly and get right. Sadly, we cannot (effectively) ensure that attendees to presentations adequately meet all the pre-requisites we'd like them to despite our best efforts at warning people about them in advance... This (IMHO) is the real reason that effective public speaking in technology contexts is such a rare skill, rather than the typical TOASTMASTERS style points that anyone can acquire with a bit of study and practice~! http://ayende.com/3720/presentation-styles#comment3http://ayende.com/3720/presentation-styles#comment3Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:48:18 GMTAll of which happened to me already http://ayende.com/3720/presentation-styles#comment2http://ayende.com/3720/presentation-styles#comment2Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:12:42 GMTYou know you've arrived in speaking a new language fluently when: 1. You dream in the new language. 2. You find it hard to express concepts in your native language that you can easily express in the new language. 3. You understand jokes and wordplay in your new language. http://ayende.com/3720/presentation-styles#comment1http://ayende.com/3720/presentation-styles#comment1Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:51:56 GMT