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Presentation Skills

Mastering Technical Presentations by Example

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Beginner content levelBeginner

Concrete patterns and anti-patterns for successful communication

Many burgeoning architects unhappily discover that, while necessary, technical skills alone do not a successful architect make. The secret to career success is clear communication, and the lingua franca of modern organizations is the presentation. It doesn't matter how good your ideas are—if you can’t present them in a compelling way, you'll never get to implement them.

Join expert Neal Ford to learn techniques for building and delivering excellent presentations, using the pattern–anti-pattern format familiar to developers. You’ll explore presentation patterns across a wide range of topics, including how to construct slides with the correct amount of information, how to handle detailed technical diagrams effectively, how to build a narrative arc for your presentation, and many others. You’ll also get acquainted with anti-patterns (such as Bullet-Riddled Corpse, a slide filled with bullets) and learn how to avoid them. See what separates good presentations from bad, find out how to make the most of tools like PowerPoint and Keynote, and ensure that your ideas are seen and heard. This course shows you how.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

By the end of this live online course, you’ll understand:

  • The differences between animations and transitions and when to use each
  • How to avoid common anti-patterns
  • The importance of a Narrative Arc and how to use presentations to reveal it

And you’ll be able to:

  • Build and present technical detail with confidence
  • Know what to add to (and what to leave off of) slides—and when to forgo slides entirely
  • Use the Invisibility pattern effectively to make slides disappear to emphasize the speaker

This live event is for you because...

  • You find it difficult to build effective and interesting technical presentations with the right level of detail.
  • You want to improve your presentation skills and aren’t sure how to do so.

Prerequisites

  • General familiarity with a presentation tool (PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, etc.)

Recommended preparation:

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Prepare: First steps (10 minutes)

  • Presentation: Preparing for your presentation; patterns covered—Know Your Audience, the Big Why
  • Group discussion: What categories of presentations are developers and architects expected to create?

Prepare: Creativity (20 minutes)

  • Presentation: Creativity; patterns covered—Narrative Arc, Concurrent Creation, Fourthought, Triad, Expansion Joints, Unifying Visual Theme, Brain Breaks, Leet Grammars, Takahashi, Cave Painting; anti-patterns covered—Alienating Artifacts, Celery
  • Group discussion: Using the technical Narrative Arc pattern
  • Hands-on exercise: Determine suitable settings for the Takahashi and Cave Painting patterns
  • Q&A

Build: Slide construction patterns (15 minutes)

  • Presentation: Slide construction patterns; patterns covered—Coda, Injured Outline, Foreshadowing, Callbacks, Composite Animation, Analog Noise, Vacation Photos, Defy Defaults; anti-patterns covered—Cookie Cutter, Bullet-Riddled Corpse, Ant Fonts, Fontaholic, Floodmarks, Borrowed Shoes
  • Group discussion: How best to fit your topic to visual media? Hands-on exercise: Determine when to use the Composite Animations, Analog Noise, Foreshadowing, and Callbacks patterns
  • Q&A

Build: Temporal patterns (15 minutes)

  • Presentation: Temporal patterns; patterns covered—Infodeck, Eventual Consistency, Charred Trail, Invisibility, Context Keeper, Bookends, Soft Transitions, Intermezzi; anti-pattern covered—Slideuments
  • Group discussion: Using the Bookends pattern and unifying the visual theme
  • Q&A

Build: Demonstrations versus presentations (10 minutes)

  • Presentation: Demonstrations versus presentations; patterns covered—Live Demo, Lipsync, Traveling Highlights, Crawling Code; anti-pattern covered—Dead Demo
  • Group discussion: When should you do live demos? When should you do live coding?
  • Q&A

Break (10 minutes)

Deliver: Performance anti-patterns (20 minutes)

  • Presentation: Performance anti-patterns—Hiccup Words, Disowning Your Topic, Going Meta, Laser Weapons, Negative Ignorance
  • Group discussion: How to discover hiccup words
  • Q&A

Deliver: Performance patterns (20 minutes)

  • Presentation: Performance patterns—Carnegie Hall, Breathing Room, Weatherman, Seeding the First Question
  • Group discussion: To podium or not to podium?
  • Q&A

Break (10 minutes)

Presenting technical artifacts: Code (25 minutes)

  • Presentation: Code—Traveling highlights, opacity shift, brackets
  • Group discussion: Live coding redux
  • Q&A

Presenting technical artifacts: Diagrams (25 minutes)

  • Presentation: Diagrams—Formal diagramming techniques (UML, C4), "NML", level of detail, representational consistency, animations
  • Group discussion: What’s the prevalent diagram style?
  • Q&A

Your Instructor

  • Neal Ford

    Neal Ford is a director, software architect, and meme wrangler at Thoughtworks, a software company and a community of passionate, purpose-led individuals who think disruptively to deliver technology to address the toughest challenges, all while seeking to revolutionize the IT industry and create positive social change. He’s an internationally recognized expert on software development and delivery, especially in the intersection of Agile engineering techniques and software architecture. Neal’s authored several books, a number of magazine articles, and dozens of video presentations (including a video on improving technical presentations) and spoken at hundreds of developer conferences worldwide. His topics of interest include software architecture, continuous delivery, functional programming, and cutting-edge software innovations. Check out his website, Nealford.com

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