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Presentation Dischord

18 Feb 2008

I’ve got a ton of presentations coming up (11 in the next 2 months although many of those are repeats) so I’ve been reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds, who authors the wonderful Presentation Zen web site. The book itself is a fast and engaging read with a lot of interesting ideas. As a long time reader of the web site, many of the content is familiar but it was nice to see it put together in a structure and also see lots of examples. I would heartily recommend it if you are interesting in building more engaging presentations.

Against this backdrop, I was just bumped from alternate to speaker for JavaOne, which is very cool but also quite daunting. I downloaded their mandatory slide template and it’s an incredibly rigid and prescriptive deck, which violates about every precept laid forth in the Presentation Zen book.

That’s ok though, I’ll take it as a creativity-producing constraint. I hope to do a fair chunk of the talk in code anyways. The talk is entitled Design Patterns Reconsidered and will be taking a new look at some common design patterns in Java and how we can make them work for us. For the JavaOne version, I’ll also be considering how language changes (like closures) can evolve these patterns into something altogether new.