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The talks will be held in the Apollo theater, so you'll have a big display for slides, coding, and demonstration. Everyone can use their own laptop and their own environment, and we'll just unplug and plug in to switch. Be prepared to dock at the podium to the right of the screen and speak from there. The main focus will be what happens on screen, and not as much on the presenter.
The audience will be anyone on the Technical KC list: developers, sysadmins, dbadmins, IT, etc. Also, the event appears on the Barkley calendar, and talks will be posted publicly to YouTube, so anyone with a tech-curious mind will be able to view it. Keep the talks tech-focused. We'll encourage attendees to bring their laptops to play along.
There's no hard-and-fast time limit to talks. Aim for 5 to 10 minutes, but feel free to go a bit longer for more details as needed. That gives us time for a small 2-3 minute Q&A after each talk and some time in between for changing computers.
The talks are intended to be informal and low-key, and you don't need to be an expert on the tech you're speaking about. There just needs to be enough understanding to show why it's cool and whet the appetite of the audience to learn a little more.
The talks should primarily focus on the "Why" and a little bit of the "How" of the technology, and as much of the "What" as gives context to why it's awesome. So, in plain terms, focus on the benefits of the technology to developers, then show a little of how it works. For brevity's sake, avoid getting too focused on a single detail or trying to make a full tutorial unless it can be done in 10-15 minutes and show off the benefits. Think "demo" instead. Try to provide resources, links, etc. at the end of the talk that point toward the nitty gritty.
A good starting point might be watching a couple lightning talks on YouTube, which are a slightly more abbreviated format.
Talks are recorded and uploaded to YouTube (and the GitHub page) a week and a half after each meeting. Someone will be present to shoot video of the speaker, but you'll also need screencasting software on your machine to capture the display for editing into the talk.
If you're on one of the latest versions of Mac OS X, you can use Quicktime Player to record. Verify this works beforehand and get familiar with how to use it so we can get a good recording and not lose time during the meeting.
If you don't have screen capture capabilities in your version of Quicktime Player, Jing might be a good alternative.
Each presenter should have two things ready on the Monday before their talk:
- Slides for the talk
- A page of resources and links (good place for follow-up tutorials to learn more)
The slides and resources will be posted to the Show-Me Tech page before the talks happen.
Both the slides and the resources page are plain HTML. They look like this:
To get started, clone the repository (see below) and make a copy of the talks/template directory for your talk. Follow this naming convention for the new path:
talks/presenter_name-name_of_talk
In your new talk directory, edit the slides.html file to prepare your slides. Slides are built using a custom version of Reveal.js. Each <section> is a new slide. Read through the template to see what features are available:
https://github.com/BarkleyUS/showmetech/blob/gh-pages/talks/template/slides.html
Edit the resources.html page in your talk directory to include all the references from your talk. The template looks like this:
https://github.com/BarkleyUS/showmetech/blob/gh-pages/talks/template/resources.html
We encourage you to make these changes yourself, then submit them through a GitHub pull request. You'll need a GitHub account and either the terminal Git client or GitHub for Mac.
First, fork the showmetech repository to make a copy of it in your own GitHub account.
Then, clone your new repository onto your machine through the GUI client or the command line:
$ git clone git@github.com:username/showmetech.git
Create your talk directory and modify the files for your talk. Edit the index.html file to include links to your slides and resources. Add the files to your repository, commit them (a commit is only on your local machine in git), and push them back up to your copy of the repository on GitHub:
$ git add index.html
$ git add talks/presenter_name-name_of_talk
$ git commit -m "add name_of_talk resources and links"
$ git push origin master
Now, your GitHub copy is up-to-date with the changes, but you need to open a request to merge it into the actual, live BarkleyUS/showmetech repo.
To do so, visit your copy of the repository on GitHub. Click the "Pull Request" link above the file listing, enter a message, and send the pull request. This will open a new issue on the showmetech repository, where admins can review your changes and merge them in to make them live. Here is an example pull request for a talk.
For more on GitHub pull requests, see here. If you need any help getting your changes in, feel free to open a GitHub issue and we'll be able to help out and make sure everything gets in there properly.