About a month ago, I had the opportunity to speak at a Code Camp sponsored by the Fairfield / Westchester .NET User Group. Preparing and delivering a presentation for your peers is a lot of work. For this, my first post, I’ll discuss this experience.

Picking a Topic
The first and most obvious step is to pick a topic. My co-worker Mark co-chaired the event. He mentioned a need for topics in the Web 2.0 track, so I volunteered to present Web 2.0 with ASP.NET.

Rather than the obligatory ASP.NET AJAX talk this topic usually brings, I decided to go with alternate approaches to Web 2.0 using ASP.NET. With technologies like Castle and jQuery and topics like tagging and mapping to cover, I had no shortage of material.

Preparing the Slides
I decided to use Google Docs to create the presentation. I figured it was an appropriate choice given my topic. Google’s presentation software is very well done, though I’m certainly not ready to abandon Impress.

I kept the slides short and succinct. The presentation was only an hour long and I didn’t want to be reading code off of slides. Instead, I planned to rely on my supporting examples (see below).

Preparing the Examples
I decided that my own Web 2.0 experience was too disconnected. I’d used some of the tools (Castle, jQuery) in very non-Web 2.0 ways. I’d been to O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference and seen some good talks on some interesting topics (location with Mapstraction was one). But I had never put myself through the pain of building a Web 2.0 site from scratch. So I decided to challenge myself…

In the three weeks following my topic submission and acceptance, I decided to use the technologies and techniques I planned to present together in a single site. I dusted off a couple of ideas I had floating around and decided that Jeopardy Story would be the most feasible. A few late nights (don’t run batch files that delete files that haven’t been committed at 2 AM), lots of Google power development and some help from friends (content not code) got me to a pretty reasonable beta in time for my presentation.

The Presentation
I was the last presenter of the day. Some of the nearly 80 attendees had left by late afternoon. The room in which my presentation was held was off the beaten path and I feared I’d be speaking to an empty room. That wasn’t the case. I had a pretty good crowd (20-30).

Having spent so much time preparing Jeopardy Story I realized I never really practiced the talk. Sure I’d gone over bits here and there, but I never really put it all together. Had I done so, I think I would have had more content on the slides. It’s not easy to keep to a tight schedule when you’re showing code that covers so many topics.

I think Jeopardy Story was a nice visual to show how I applied the technologies in my talk. But I think something is lost in not working through some samples from scratch. Showing how I used jQuery to create an auto-complete textbox doesn’t have the same take-home value as writing the code from scratch (it’s wicked easy by the way).

The Overall Experience
Presenting at Code Camp was totally worth the effort and time. I had some rough spots and I learned a lot about the process of preparing to speak. Preparing the site was fun and it forced me to do something I’d been talking about doing for two years. But I’m not likely to tie a major web site building effort to a presentation again.

It’s always challenging to find the balance between text-heavy slides and slides that don’t help the cadence of a presentation. Even the more experienced speakers had problems with time. I’ll have to start recording myself as I practice…

Afterwards, I had some attendees approach me to provide some positive feedback on the talk and express interest in the topic. While I’m sure I didn’t impress everyone, it seems I did some.

Would I do it again?
Actually, I did just last week. I’ll write about that later…