CppCon2014 Presentations | Hacker News Reader

CppCon2014 Presentations

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55 pointsBruceM10 comments

These are only the slides, and while it's nice to have them all together, slides to talks generally provide very little value unless they're exceptionally† well made. From flipping through a random selection of them, i can tell they're just average examples of the species, good for when someone is talking over them, but fairly useless taken on their own.

Will this repository be amended with links to the videos to make it useful?

† exceptional would be slides in this format: http://rjbs.manxome.org/talks/moose/

What do you think of my slides? ("STL Features And Implementation Techniques") I try to make them readable by themselves.

I got a bit out of them, but even as a veteran C++11 user I found quite a few pieces lacking in motivation (i.e. I could read the text but not grasp the reason for its existence). And your slide with "I actually wrote this code" says C++14 will reject the bad code, but doesn't mention how or why.

It's clear that you put thought into having real content in your slides, as opposed to some (including from this group) which are mostly funny pictures used as a sort of ice-breaker while we can only imagine the presenter talked about technical topics on stage. But the reader of your slides is still left far behind the attendee of your talk.

Yeah, the presentation covered those parts (motivation, and putting the pieces together). C++14 rejects the bad code by providing a deleted overload for const string&&, as covered in the following slides.

My slides are already at the upper limit for information density - I don't think I could cram even more into them.

I agree about information density of the slides. There are some potential solutions:

(1) Write most of what you would say as notes on each slide. Some presenters do this to help them get through a presentation anyway; you can do it to help readers after the presentation.

(2) Encourage the venue to record video of the talk, or at least audio. This can be synchronized with the slides using various software packages. The audio needs to be very high quality--a camcorder mic in the back won't do.

The talks were professionally recorded (and will be available in like a month). Thanks for the reminder about notes - I don't need them myself, but I didn't consider that people would want to read them in the slides.

I once made a presentation that was much more self-contained than this. Everything wanted to say was spelt out in plain English. The take-home message in each slide was color coded and simplified to levels you could deliver to VCs. The title matched the contents (unlike yours it seems to me) by claiming no more and no less than the contents. The outline and flow of the presentation was made explicit after section.

Then I received the feedback. While I was seeing nods from several people during the presentation, many people later reported that they could not understand one single thing.

I learned presentation skills that day (i.e., this experience taught me the same).

Imagine surveying all the audience members about percentage of the material they absorbed from your presentation and averaging across people. If you think the number would be more than say 30%, I do not think you know typical audience well.

PS: Please see these as constructive comments.

> The title matched the contents (unlike yours it seems to me)

How do you think my title differs from the contents? As far as I can tell, it is completely accurate.

This has been suggested before, but just as the exceptional example i mentioned has, your slides need notes below them to explain what you'd do with your voice in the talk, namely which bits one should pay attention to when reading.

Looking forward to see these in parallel with the actual video s of the presentations.

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