Showing posts with label Perl community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Perl community. Show all posts

Saturday, October 3, 2009

YAPC presentation styles

One personal comment I got from the YAPC::EU::09 Survey results was : "Split slides so they contain less text". Well, while attending several talks, I felt exactly the reverse : I wished the speaker had condensed slides so they contain more text !

Finding the right balance is really a difficult question. It is true that I have a tendency to fill slides with a lot of material, in order to exploit complementary channels : while my voice gives the general idea, or emphasizes a particular point, the slide can convey more detailed information, and people in the audience can grab more content if they are especially interested in one particular aspect.

Probably I like this style because it corresponds to my own way of learning. When I was at school, at a time where beamers were rare and expensive, most teachers used physical transparencies. Some of them had the habit of putting the transparency and immediately hiding it with a piece of paper; then they would progressively uncover the slide, one point at a time. I hated that habit, because I was forced to think at the same speed as the teacher. If I see the global picture at once, I can immediately choose which points seem more important to me, and focus on them, maybe already preparing a question, or think back at what was said before, or anticipate what is probably going to be said next. But if the teacher dictates the rhythm, and decides to pause for 5 minutes on a point which is important to him, but not to me, or decides to quickly skip over a detail which I need to elaborate in my head, then I'm in trouble.

The modern way of uncovering slides one point at a time is the Takahashi style (lots of slides, very few words, huge font), which seems much praised in the Perl community. I must admit that I was quite impressed the first time I saw a presentation in this style : it is quite efficient for a lightning talk, or to create some suspense at a particular point in a presentation. However, if many speakers adopt this style just out of fashion, without deliberate thinking about which effect they want to achieve, then at the end of the day it becomes quite boring, and I feel like having watched several hours of videoclips. After such a day I don't really remember what were the highlights.


Tuesday, August 11, 2009

The Perl community is exceptional

This year I went to the YAPC::EU::2009 conference in Lisbon. I missed the one from last year, so being a little less accustomed to those gatherings, I recovered the same feeling that I got at
my first YAPC conference in Birmingham in 2006 : this community is like nothing else I've seen before.

I had been to quite a lot of computer science conferences in my previous life, where the climate was very different. In the academic world, people mostly think about the papers: if your paper is accepted, you go to the conference to add one more line on your publication list; if it is not accepted, maybe you go nevertheless to see what are the ideas in fashion, and to do a bit of networking that may help you getting accepted on the following year, or build an international circle that will give more credibility to your next research proposal. In that world, it's nice to see the community again, but meanwhile there is always a feeling of competition, because the person sitting next to you might well be that anonymous expert that turned down your last paper submission. Question sessions may be quite harsh, too, because people in the audience sometimes are more interested in showing off their own knowledge, rather than genuinely trying to clarify what the speaker was talking about.

YAPC conferences are very different. People come because they love it, and some of them even come on their own time and money. They love the fun, of course, the special dresses, the jokes, the culture; but they also love to join for shaping new ideas, new tools, new constructs that will be helpful to the whole community. They don't come for marking their territory; they come for passion, and they know that by working together, everybody can help Perl to improve and expand.

I think I've never heard any aggressive question at a YAPC: rather, the audience sometimes helpfully points to some resources that the speaker might have overlooked.

All of this makes YAPC very much enjoyable, so I'll definitely try to attend next year in Pisa.