The IT Student Blog

Using a background image to cover the entire slide

How should we otherwise communicate abstract and complex ideas that intrigues us, creates business, and changes the world. Most people are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the technical terms and the norms of the hacker community. It is our duty to convey intricate ideas, whether it be requirements, architectural decisions, or implementation details, in the clearest way possible.

Within the SEM programme presenting is common practice. Project work has to be presented for your classmates, supervisors and examiners. We are naturally nervous when those occasions are mandatory or the stakes are higher for whatever reason. There are many great authors and inspirational sources for making your presentations better on the Internet. Two of my personal favourites are Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, and Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design and author of Slide:ology. But I thought I share a few of my own experiences when presenting within the SEM programme, both as a classmate and occasionally as a supervisor.

First, lets look at how I remember us starting out presenting and errors that I still experience today when watching presentations.

Using fonts effectively can help your audience focus

• Too many ideas are cramped in to one slide – message becomes unclear
• Poor use of imagery and visuals – slides are distracting rather than enhancing the presentation experience
• Presenter talks to the screen and not to the audience – the slides becomes the presenter’s notes

The answer to resolving all of above is seemingly easy to envisage. Then, despite trying to lead by example is it so hard to change? And here’s the catch; preparing a presentation takes time. A lot of time.  In preparation for the latest presentation that Emil and I held for our class we spent roughly 10 hours preparing the slides. Unfortunately, due to bad planning, we never had time to practice enough and the delivery was so-so. We survived on having presented together many times before.

As said earlier, in our field of study, we constantly have to communicate abstract and complex ideas. Visualising the how a three-tier layered architecture fulfils the stakeholders needs is not an easy task. Nevertheless, by inverting the points made above we get three good starting points.

• One idea – one slide. If the idea is too complex, spread it across several slides.
• Use images to explain and enhance. Flickr’s Creative Commons library has tonnes of useful imagery. The audience listens to your words, use the visuals to focus on the idea you’re communicating at that moment.
• Write your own notes and aim the slides to the audience.

Consider staging your ideas across several slides if content is too complex

Actually, that last point should be emphasized. Your words and your visuals should be chosen to suit your audience. Presenting for geeks allows you to use the vocabulary of geeks. Presenting for customers is a completely different thing. Think about your audience, and do it early, already when you start planning your presentation. Otherwise your audience will not understand what message you are trying to convey despite how interesting your content may be.

Now I hope this will inspire a few more students to drop the boring slides and start to present their already interesting content in a fashionable and compelling manner! As Jesper says: “copy-tweak,” start small, then move slowly and experiment. Once you’re out there [in the big world] it is a lot harder to test and the pressure and nervousness might be much higher. Finally, I’d also like to recommend a short introductory presentation that the Duarte team made for (and with) PowerPoint 2010. Watch it here.

Ps. The images in this post are taken from our latest presentation. A presentation about how organisations can improve “corporate communities” by adopting practices found in the free and open source communities.

During the spring I was planning to write about my bachelor thesis, how I went about writing one and what it was about. However it took a lot more time than I thought so I never got around to it then but I will write about it now instead.

The area I researched, together with a class mate of mine, was in model driven development, more specifically about how 3D visualization could improve model comprehension. We worked together with Ericsson AB located at Lindholmen in Göteborg, where we carried out a case study.

The thesis turned out really well and we got nominated for one scholarship and will attend two workshops where our paper got accepted (sending your paper to workshops or conferences is of course not mandatory for the course itself but I find it more fun to work towards real goals). The first workshop is NW-MODE in Finland, I will be leaving on Tuesday to present our work. Below you can take a look at the prototypes we made in SketchUp. If you would like to read the thesis you can find it (and many others) in GUPEA

If you are soon to be writing your first thesis, here are my 4 best tips

• Read other papers of the same kind as the one you are about to write.
• Find an area that interests you. Try to find a question that you would really like to know the answer to.
• Personally I found it very valuable to work with someone, I had someone to discuss with and we kept each other motivated.
• If you would like to work with a company, contact them a few months in advance to work out what kind of research you could do there.

Erlangers outside Old Session House

Even though every newspaper in every stand featured Michael Jackson’s death on the frontpages Magnus and I were more excited than ever. The second day of Erlang Factory were two hosts a new round of many exciting talks and it all began with the two keynotes: one by Simon Peyton-Jones and another by Kenneth Lundin.

Haskell and Erlang: Growing up together
For those of you who don’t know, Simon Peyton-Jones is one of the fathers of Haskell. He quoted his daugther saying “I know I’m not your first child. It’s ok.” Simon, an awesome rhetoric, filled the main hall of Erlang Factory with ease. His talk demonstrated Haskell’s and Erlang’s interdependent relationship since their inception which also happened to occur at roughly the same time. Haskell came from a university world, Erlang on the contrary originated from industry (read: Ericsson) and Simon pointed out some of the challenges that Haskell faced due to this. Of course Erlang faced other challenges. Challenges which offers many laughs today!

Erlang/OTP and Multicore Performance in Particular
Kenneth’s talk, compared to Simon’s, focused on the fine details of the inner core of Erlang; the virtual machine. For me, most of the things we’re hard to put in relation to anything else. Surely, most of the terms were familiar, but to really understand their work (which I’ve been told by a trustworthy source is awesome) I guess you either a) need more Erlang experience or b) have attended previous talks by Kenneth so that you can put the improvements he addressed in perspective. The one thought that struck me after this talk is Usain Bolt’s quote “Hard work and dedication.” That’s what the OTP team is for you, and the Erlang community!

Afterwards three new tracks kicked off, I attended the following two presentations and they “did it right”, i.e the presentation in itself.

Campfire loves Erlang
Mark Imbracio changed the polling service in Campfire, essentially what is underneath the Ruby front-end of 37signals messaging service, to use Erlang instead of C. By investing time in benchmarking Mark could show the impact of reducing the code base, adding extensibility, improving maintainability (1 OS process in Erlang compared to 240 C processes) and still being equally responsive! The talk contained a practical almost tangible discussion on where Erlang really shines.

An introduction to F#
Though not being an Erlang talk, Don Syme, managed to impress even Joe Armstrong with some of the stuff that they’ve built into F#. That would be the unit measurements in case you wonder. What Don did right was demonstrating the language in its relation to .net. Basically, a .dll of a F# program is usable by any other .net application. Through visual comparisons he efficiently high-lighted the large differences between C# and F#, and although the talk seemed to persuade C# programmers to use F#, he did a great job meeting the Erlangers.

Editor’s note: this post was written at Heathrow terminal 5 waiting for the plane sometime during the night between Saturday and Sunday.

It’s been an intense day. There were so much interesting talks that summarizing them would be s feat. There were those that were in a fairly familiar domain but were so dense that one could not possibly digest the content and come up with a question in time for QA.

Other talks opened your eyes for what is a “practical” application of Erlang, cross platform support for MIDI or a blog editor with support for English quotation marks, anyone?

Here are our thoughts on the two most intriguing talks that Magnus and I covered during the day.

RabbitMQ

How do you implement a high performance message broker/middleware? And how do you save/dump messages to disk as efficiently as possible? RabbitMQ is what we(?) who has to work with tightly coupled psuedo-queue designs dream of. It is open source and based upon an open standard, AMQP, and there is at least one alternative implementation available. Freedom, within limits.

Tidier

I have many times been coming back to old code of mine and realised, like a lightning strike, that “OMG DID I WRITE THIS?!” Any programmer who has some kind of distance to him or herself will admit to this. Kostis Sagonas takes self-insight to the next level by extensive analysis of Erlang programs and by formalising so-called best practices the Tidier tool reshape your code to look awesome. In turn, you as a programmer have to kneel to your previous mistakes.  At least you wont make them again, or will you? Afterall, isn’t better to do it “right” from the start? Impossible.

The day ended with an Erlounge in the Crypt with lightning talks, snacks, beer and great possibilities for networking! Due to the Erlang community’s openness and still rather limited reach the Erlounge provided an arena in which two excited students got to meet the core people behind the language.

Looking forward to another day (unfortunately without Michael Jackson)!