Detailed Notes
Welcome back to Building Better Developers, your go-to podcast for Becoming a Better Developer. In this episode, “Successful Presentation Tips for Developers: Effective Demo Strategies,” we explore the nuances of delivering presentations and demos, focusing on non-technical aspects that can significantly impact your performance. We also explore how to set yourself up for success and avoid common pitfalls that can undermine your credibility and effectiveness.
Read more: https://develpreneur.com/successful-presentation-tips-for-developers-effective-demo-strategies
Stay Connected: Join the Developreneur Community We invite you to join our community and share your coding journey with us. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting, there’s always room to learn and grow together. Contact us at [email protected] with your questions, feedback, or suggestions for future episodes. Together, let’s continue exploring the exciting world of software development.
Additional Resources * Effective Presentations and Communicating Your Message – Don Colliver (https://develpreneur.com/effective-presentations-and-communicating-your-message-don-colliver/) * Benefits Of Presentations – Worth The Stress (https://develpreneur.com/benefits-of-presentations-worth-the-stress/) * How to Create an Effective Clickable Demo (https://develpreneur.com/create-effective-clickable-demo/)
Transcript Text
[Music] welcome everybody I guess since we just hit record I should say say hello and welcome um we are just you know we're we're as always we're heavily scripted here so I just hit the record button it's like oh yeah I guess we should say hi to all of you guys that have have joined us as we're trying to figure out what do we want to talk about in our podcast today um I do want to give like a little little bonus thing um went back and was listening to uh the podcast for like recent episodes uh since we like and I haven't done that much in the last I don't know several weeks and I was going to give you a little feedback and it's actually so I was thinking about it and I was going to do it off you know off air off camera but I was think you know it may be something good for anybody that's been doing podcasting or wants to get into podcasting because it is a um it is a it's a it's an acquired skill I think I mean some people are natural to it but like like some people are just born with like radio voice and some of that kind of stuff but most people people and you'll see this with any other really any other podcast series like you want to go back and look at like Gary vaynerchuk when he was doing his original like the first 100 episodes of Wine Library TV he's still he's still Gary He's still like a little over the top and F bombs everywhere and some stuff like that but he wasn't the same until you get it like I don't know four 500 episodes in like Tim Ferris the same one you go back to the very early stuff it's nothing like the of course now he's got like you know heavily produced stuff and so what I was doing is listening to you and I in our interactions and this brought up you know a couple of things that how I've seen myself grow and change especially as we went to this format and then also you as I've talked to you before we've done stuff and then also you doing some of the original like we call it the pilot the unaired pilot episodes that you did and then as we got into that uh one of the things that's always been that we've talked about a lot over over time is from a from a podcast view is getting away from um a lecture kind of thing is is because you want to engage with the the audience yes you people out there you want to engage with them even though they're not there and so one of the things that I think has helped immensely is this is that we're actually talking to somebody I noticed it for myself when I did when I went to video instead of pure audio but I went to video um interviews even though I didn't record it I didn't I didn't send the video out just the fact of talking to somebody and being able to see them you know in this virtual sense my mic just keeps like popping out wants to show itself there um that it would just it was one of those things that it it suddenly became less um rigid or something like that so there's a little personality that came out of I was noticing that listen to you is like is that um it is funny because it's like I've done this for a while and you've done this for all of you know a very short period of time and I've gotten so i' especially in this I'm a little more animated I you know I have a lot of fun and you're still I think what you're the the way we talked about and because Natalie and I were were assessing ourselves and and where we're at stuff like that is it's it's really it's almost like um feel free to slow down because I don't and I I was actually surprised I was like should I like no you like I I guess have done this enough that I still enunciate very well even when I talk really really fast I can still get the words out but I think you're you're try I think and maybe part of it is you sort of match my speed a little bit but then it throws you off because that's not natural to you or at least it's not yet and so when we go through particularly like I throw something out to you it's like hey what do you think is feel free to like slow it down a little bit and it goes back to actually what we talked about when we were working on the the Sprint QA stuff is having to there we had to really slow down and enunciate because we talking every a lot of people they were like English as a second language and so it was it was blowing their heads up to try to keep up with us when we started rolling and so it's just a little feedback there I hope that you know it's I hope you you see where we're going with that and we'll just sort of see it's I hate doing it in a sense because it's very generic but I'm hoping that it's something that connects because it took it we were talking about for a little bit like what what are the pluses the pros and the cons and the pluses the minuses and how this change in format has adjusted stuff um and and listening to you and listening to me and stuff like that I was trying to figure out like the best way to describe it so hopefully that makes some level of sense to you just a you know as a helpful hint kind of thing yeah and it happens a lot especially kind of with you and me you know when we get excited about a topic or we really get into something you tend to forget you're talking to people sometimes because you're not really interacting with them um face to face so it's like whoops I I may have just rambled off a whole bunch of stuff really quickly it's like uhoh but you can't necessarily roll it back uh in a presentation like this so you have to kind of watch that and I do try to keep keep it Tempo but there are times where it's like oh it's an exciting topic and I forget and and you do too I mean we all do but like you said that you've done enough of these where you're comfortable enough to pronun you know pronunciate and speak literally enough the other thing too I think is I've tried to use my mic uh my big pop mic like you and it hasn't come through as well on the MacBook uh so actually had to go to just using the MacBook for our podcasts right now so you're using so you're using your MacBook mic as opposed to your your you know USB mic or your other mic yeah uh today I'm actually using the headphones because I'm not at home uh but typically it's just the laptop I'm just speaking into it you're coming out of the speakers and it's just one that's funny that's actually a neat little side note I've I've tried when I first worked with this stuff when I was testing stuff my MacBook was not bad it like I would use my MacBook and this is you know 15 years ago almost now um this is back when I was going to create a audio book before I wrote the book I was like I don't want to write that's too much work I'm just going to speak and I realized that speaking sucked it didn't work for me so for that piece but my mic was really good I could do it and it sounded great since then I've gotten so I've you know I've used my mic I've had this mic for year well this one is newer but the before that I used a you know an external mic and when I would go back it didn't it like didn't sound right things weren't coming through right and so now if I try to go back like I had I had a mic break on me not too long ago when the wires was wonky or whatever and I was talking through my my laptop and everybody's like I can't hear you I can't understand so I don't know if the mic had move maybe the mic is just I haven't used it enough and it's like Got dirt in it or something like that but your sound it's it's it's because I I feel like I need to have a microphone a separate microphone and yeah yours you know obviously yours works awesome because it it sounds good so it's uh it's funny I wonder how much of that is like and yours is a u your laptop is a the whatever the M1 right M1 yeah it's the first gen yeah and this is there's a trick to this though so there there is a trick to it uh especially if you have an external one and go back and forth your internal settings do not necessarily flip over to the new mic so your other mic settings might be applied to the local desktop mic and it may not sync so I always make sure that if I'm switching I go into like Zoom or whatever the recording is first I open up systems and I make sure everything's Max and then I go into zoom and then I tweak Zoom to be happy with me speaking uh so another little bonus I guess for those yeah there you go boys and girls you got two for one today um because a lot of times especially with like slack or things like that they take their own audio settings and there's a lot of times where like it switches on me where I've always used like the desktop or I use my pop mic but then I all of a sudden I'm in the call and it's using the desktop it's like okay this is strange so I've always gotten the if I'm doing a presentation or a recording to always check the settings first if I'm in a new environment uh but essentially what you do especially like for something like Zoom go into your system set everything to Max then go into your tool and tweak it from the program uh I I've noticed that if you do it that way you get better you get a better audio experience in general than if you try to let the software uh bump it up versus the Hardware bump it up those are good points and that actually gives me an idea for a podcast for this one is um I don't think we've talked about the I think we've talked about it here and there but I don't think we've it's ever been a podcast type uh thing and I don't know if we've even written an article I think it just came up in Prior like Mastermind stuff and it is the idea of um essentially doing a presentation or speaking you know like if you're going to do like a uh like a Meetup or you're doing some sort of presentation or something like that or or even like you know if you've got a class that you're teaching and it's particularly if it's not your home you know class and environment some of the things about how do you do it like what are some cool thing good things to know when you're going to demo software when you're going to present something because that like those are perfect points it's like hey get in there and like plug all your crap up and make sure that you've got all your settings right for that environment because in inevitably as you know well and you're like the master of that I don't want to steal the spoiler but you you've got like four million little plug types because you're always going to have whatever plug you need you're not going to have unless you have all of them basically so um how about that for a and I'll just like we'll see where it goes but I was saying hey that could be a pretty good episode what you I like that one um we'll see how it goes I may have some bonus material at the end for some additional audio software and tools that we could use um we it just depend where the conversation goes but if we get to the end and we haven't really touched on any uh software bum me if I don't remember it um just kind of ping me on that and we'll kind of throw that as the bonus because I got a couple ideas on that yeah because we can do that because actually me and my son my my youngest son is going into um video production and stuff like that and he's special effects is where he wants to go so he's spent the last couple of years doing that kind of stuff and he we were talking actually about adobe's Suite of stuff because he's as a student he gets it free so he uses um um Premiere is there you the primary thing he does and he says and everything plugs right into that so he uses that quite a bit and I was I was talking a little bit about you know audio side and he goes well actually you can do all that within Premiere and then he mentioned the other one that everybody uses is the one that you mentioned um you always use um it's an artist name I think um audacity or uh it's um it's not iMovie it is no um uh is it I want to say it's like Michelangelo but it's not Michelangelo it's something like that I think it's a name it's it's video Da Vinci D Vinci D Vinci there we go I was like I knew it was something like that and he said oh yeah Da Vinci is great and I said yeah actually Michael's been telling me for a long time that that's you know awesome and we started talking about I guess there's plugins for all this stuff I didn't even know all the stuff that's in there and so funny with that um like you know I've actually gone back to just using iMovie I've actually figured out how to use its audio editor to do a lot of the manipulation I need there and I don't ever get out of iMovie for anything now yeah for the for the YouTube stuff I got so I never got out of it I didn't I got what I needed because really all I needed was um to level it to a certain point so it was usually so it was loud enough and then after that it was fine you know I was I had all my settings on my mics enough so I didn't have to do a whole lot of stuff and I didn't a I never almost never edited the audio purely I would just if I needed to pull something else I could just pull out you know like a whole section of video plus audio so the only time I went into Audio Only was I used you know Adobe edition forever for the podcast for the purely I still do it with iMovie because essentially what I do is I just extract the audio from podcast section extend the video portions drop in the intro and outro and then I can actually add the faders to those attach them and Export the audio so I never get out of iMovie now it it really cuts down on a lot of the time it takes to do a lot of our edits for our videos and our production yep lots of good points so we will definitely throw this out to you so hello and welcome back we are continuing our season 21 of of the building better developers develop a newer podcast this episode we're going to talk about uh presenting and demos and not as much about maybe not so much about the technical stuff although we will get into that a little bit but more about the non-technical things and the things that you will do that will shoot yourself in the foot if you don't like go at it with the right attitude or if you assume because assume you know what they always say is if you assume something you're going to look like crap in front of your boss or somebody like that so we're going to talk about that this episode but first I got to introduce myself because that's what I do I am Rob Broadhead I am one of the founders of develop andur also the founder of RB Consulting um you can check us out on the web and all that kind of good stuff basically develop andur is where we we build better developers ARB Consulting is we take those developers and we go out and we solve problems and leverage technology to simplify automate integrate all that good stuff but the other thing we do is we talk to Michael all the time and I'm actually using his name shoot I was going to make him introduce more but I'll at least tease that that's his first name go ahead and finish up that introduction hey everyone my name is Michael MOS another co-founder of developer Nur I'm also the founder of Envision QA where we have small to midsize businesses and small Healthcare clinicians build software and test software for existing applications so I want to talk about presentations in because we actually beforehand for those of you that are here and watching us hey you already know this so sorry to be repetitive redundant but we were talking about like some of the things we've run into particularly from a a techn a technical point of view and we've talked about microphones and some things like that one of the things that and that's what triggered this episode was how many times I have gone to a demo of some sort where I have either I am presenting I am the presenter or I am watching somebody present and this includes um demos it includes some you know speakers usually not a huge place you know but it's if you go to like meetups or smaller conferences like the side rooms and conferences and stuff like that and actually even back to you know college days when somebody would come in that was a a guest speaker or something like that anytime you go into an environment that you don't own that you don't know then there are some things that you need to be aware of and these things are going to help you you know speed your way through it and make it look smooth even if honestly even if it's not because you're going to get the stuff smoothed out before you have witnesses to the event now one of the things is bring get all of your stuff that you're going to use to present get there early depending on how it is usually at least like 15 minutes to usually more like a half hour to 45 minutes early I would say early enough think about what if you show up and you have to run to the store to get something what kind of time frame do you need to be able to do that and still be able to do your presentation because I have literally had that happen I have seen that happen many times where somebody gets there and it's like oh the remote that you really need for your presentation it had batteries and they're dead and so now you got to run down this the corner store or wherever it's at and go get batteries just so because nobody has spares it's things like that that happen it is Murphy's law where if it can go bad if it can go wrong it will this includes things like you're going to go to a very modern place with modern tools and you're going to find out that the only way that they have to connect from your video to your laptop is I don't know like jumper cables or something weird like that they're going to have something that's just so backwards or so brand new that it's like oh my gosh I didn't even think about this I will give you a really quick example and not to like put somebody on the spot but hey I just recently got married and we the night before put all our audio stuff together and we had it like we figured it out it was somebody it was a whole somebody else's place and it was such a mess that it was just like okay I'm going to take a phone iPhone common iPhone we're going to plug it in we're just going to run the music through that awesome worked tested out everything's great next day come in and the guy that's the DJ had not done that he didn't show up beforehand he had a newer iPhone so where we had everything we needed for the old uh you know non USBC or whatever it the the original Apple or the most recent one back Apple plug he didn't have that and so we ended up spending they ended up actually spending time trying to find a way to get a dongle into that and finally they had to find somebody else's phone and copy stuff over and it was just it was a mess it was all because assumptions because it's like oh it should be fine don't ever trust anybody else to do it use your equipment check it out before I throw this over to Michael I will go one more step outside of that technical side if you're doing a demo if you're doing a especially if it's a sales presentation or if it's a class that you're teaching one make sure you have your slides whatever they are make sure you check your slides for things like I don't know spelling errors and stuff like that like just run through the make sure you're running through them verify that they're okay make sure that they're in order make sure that you didn't lose some make sure that you have like I always have like a folder that I make specifically for that beforehand and then when I get there the first thing I do is I open that folder and make sure that all the stuff I need is in there so you're not searching your drive for it you're not suddenly like oh crap I need I put it on Dropbox and it disconnected on me this morning or something like that it doesn't hurt to even have it like on a little USB drive that you could plug in as a backup and don't change anything if it's especially if it's code like seal that code off put it somewhere so it is Standalone so that you don't touch it and nobody else touches it because I don't know how many times I've gone in to do that like last minute change and everything's wrong and it's just ruins the whole thing now I'm going to take a deep breath and I'm going to let Michael share his experiences and his thoughts on this because I know you sir have done this a few times as well uh especially with your educational background I bet you got some great stories well it's funny because you know I was at your wedding and me and Renee both commented that you know your bag of tricks is sitting at the house with the dogs otherwise you could probably fix their problem in about five minutes given the problem I don't go anywhere without my bag of tricks so I'm one of those um I get not uh paranoid people that you know I'm afraid I'm going to go into a situation for a presentation a meeting whatever and there's been way too many times where things break or it doesn't work or to Rob's point the code broke or changed and now you can't present so a lot of things that I've learned over the years have let me give you a few little tidbits so to build on Rob's Point um you could be like me and basically go buy a cookie cutter everything that you always need with you and just carry it with you uh there's enough of these little um pocket or even wallet size uh kits you can get for a lot of your USB cables um micro HDMI HDMI and they're all USB plugins it's kind of really cool uh but if you don't want to go that route if you're going into like a call presentation we kind of talked about this before jumping into the podcast you always want to make sure that you are familiar with the tools that you're using so for instance we're using Zoom to record our call here so the cool thing with this is zoom has its own capabilities at the start of every call you can say test m my sound settings test my video settings and you click that and then you can make sure you can hear the audio coming out of the call you can also test your mic make sure you can hear yourself coming out of your mic behind that though that so that is more of a software adjustment tool to using your internal audio and um microphone within your operating system or whatever machine you're using there are machine level uh applications for your specific operating systems Windows Mac whatever and you need to also make sure that those are configured correctly as well because if you have your sound turned way down on your mic at the hardware level it doesn't matter how good your software is it's not going to really be able to boost your audio that well that being said if you go to the hardware Direction where you get like these external microphones like me and rob you use or use your desktop audio you again need to make sure you have the right drivers you need to make sure that the software that comes with those works and if you're using like soundboards and things of that nature you want to make sure that you mark where your settings are for your calls because if someone comes in and changes that now you're going to be spending hours trying to get that setup again now to carry this one step further um so you take from the setup approach anytime I go anywhere uh like Rob said if you have a presentation or something like that make sure you have a backup so typically I will always print whatever I take with me I still have paper copies but I also carry an iPad which also has a downloaded copy of the document and I have my MacBook with me which has a physical copy of the file in case both of those fail I also have a backup on my keychain I have a USB uh little thumb drive that's just sits on my keychain in case of emergencies I always throw a file on there if I'm going to go present right there you now have four places where you have your presentation so if you fail at that point it's out of your hands there's just nothing you can do but if you at least have the paper and you can't plug in you can still have your notes you can still talk and present the material to people and you should be okay to do that now if you're in a big Auditorium you might lose your voice because you're going to have to shout very loud if nothing works but hey it can be done carry that over a little bit more with the presentation so you talked about the code you know don't make changes to the code with the presentation piece what I've had to do in the past is if you have code that is kind of a work in progress or a proof of concept sometimes it's better to take screenshots of that code or mockups of that code and throw it into something like PowerPoint uh or something like presentation where you can actually mock it up make it look userfriendly and if you're really good at it you can do it in such a way that your slides go with the way you click the application so like if you click a button to change the screen the next slide would basically be click oh hey this is what it would look like so you can still make an interactive presentation as if you're doing a real live demo so that's another way you can kind of set yourself up for success in case something fails or the application isn't ready and the last thing I'll kind of note on before I pass it back to you Rob is your machine so I mentioned that I have multiple copies and backups I also carry my bag of tricks with me because in my situation I everything I have is Mac based so what's cool about that is if you use iCloud or again you keep backups of your copies on everything most of your USB or even cloud-based streaming apps work so in my case I actually also carry with me a um was it a Google Play stick I carry an Amazon stick and I also have an Apple TV I carry with me when I travel in those situations if you don't have anything to plug into for a presentation you can potentially stream it to whatever uh it is that you're working out so if you have a TV you can just plug it into a TV and stream it to a TV across the room so that's another way that you can actually save yourself some hassle if you're walking into an unknown situation if you know they have TVs then bring your own streaming service so you can actually stream to those TVs Rob I'll pass it back over to you those are a lot of great points I do want to I do want to hit on the um you know having a PowerPoint or something like that if you're doing even if you're doing a code demo unless the point or unless like a key part of the demo is how does it is showing it working live I would work I would go with a a point and like a clickable demo set up a couple of you know even if it's I've done it off of an existing application because you don't want to spend all day you you don't want to spend a lot of time essentially Reinventing the wheel to have a demo but what I have done that has worked really well is I've gone in and I've done just take screenshots of a of an of an application and then I can either I can even I can set it up so I could just I've done it as simple as just HTML Pages it's a clickable image and when you click on it it doesn't matter that you clicked on that button or not it's going to go to the next page because I can control that I'm not gonna let anybody else play with it I'm good and I know exactly what it's going to do I don't care about the data because and that is the nice thing about a clickable demo is being able to stick to the story that you want to tell that is a bonus one is don't ever if you're on a live application of any waveform or fashion don't ever go with the somebody in the audience says hey could you do this either say you take a look into it or yes we can but that's not part of this demo or I'll talk to you offline or something like that because as soon as you do and almost always that's going to be the thing that breaks your entire application breaks your demo throws a whole thing just like it goes completely off the rails so and honestly can lose you Confidence from your your audience because you're showing you're telling them in a story and saying this is how it works and this is all this good stuff and this is all great until you like they say well hey try this you're like oh yeah we can do that and then bam you just lost credibility because you thought you could and even if you say I don't know that we can but hey let's try that that's awesome if you're in the middle of like a testing demonstration and you want to be able to test this thing and you want to beat on the the whole point is to break it awesome if that's not your goal then don't take that on even if you are 100% sure which you're never you're 99.999999% sure that that's going to work if you haven't tested it if you haven't verified it if that is not part of your script do not go off script it is like it is one of those things it's like a golden rule for Pol policians when they're out there stumping that's why it's speech speech speech you know like script script script they script everything do the same thing because when you start going off script it's real easy to get off track and to and to break something so I wanna I'll give you last words here well I want to take on to that because um when we were teaching so if you are presenting or teaching code something else that's very beneficial especially for the recipient or the student as they're watching and it's also good for you for post presentation is copy all your code into notepad into a text file and then streamline your application that you're demoing to just comments so now as you're walking through don't type the code go copy it from your text and paste it in at each step and then walk through what you're doing this helps address two things one one none of us write code well when someone's standing over our shoulders we have typos we have grammar mistakes we just get nervous and things just go off the rails two you might forget something and having the code right there it's like oh yeah I need that so you you don't miss a step so now you don't break your train of thought or the conversation as you're walking through the presentation what are your thoughts on that rout I agree that's I think that is the best way to help yourself out is to have comments either have it commented out if you want to do something that's a like a progressive kind of lecture you know where it's like okay first we're going to do this these couple of lines and then we're going to do these things is either like I always either have it in a SE like you know step one step two step three code file so I'm executing different files or I have I have had some especially if you've got like block comments that makes it easy because it's like okay now this is uncommented now I'm going to uncomment these three lines and then you can talk through it as you go and then the other thing which is honestly what I've done probably more often than anything is I will I'll have my full code in one file and then I'm basically rebuilding it but like you said I'm not going to type it this is way too easy especially if you're in a language that is case sensitive or space sensitive or anything like that it is way too easy to get like type one thing off or you know mistype a a variable name or something and you go through the whole thing and then you you end up spending sometimes you know 20 minutes chasing down a typo just you know be safe like test that code write it beforehand test it make sure and that's honestly I think that is one of the biggest things that I see if you go out to really any tutorial boot camp education site go to you know UD Demi or anything like that if you look the code the comments on anything that's code related almost always you're going to get people there a bunch it doesn't work code doesn't work code doesn't work and sometimes it's very simple it's like hey your code doesn't work because you forgot this now sometimes it is more important it's like the code doesn't work because you didn't you forgot to mention that there's this other thing you did or there's this way that you need to set up your environment so that's why you know that's why we when we do this a lot of times start from scratch of like okay there's somewhere along the way here's where we built that environment now it may be you know six months down the road we're teaching stuff but it's like if you're struggling remember go back to day one here's the notes here's what you need to do to get it right what you need to do to get it right is give us feedback is let us know info developer or.com check us out at developer or.com check us out on develop andur on our YouTube channel go out to Twitter SLX it's develop develop or you can go out to Facebook we have a page you go to LinkedIn and we have a page if we don't we're going to have to build one real quick but I think we have one and just however you can get Reach Out to us feel free to do so we would love to hear back from you we would love to get feedback and just let us know what kind of problems you're running into because yeah we obviously have problems every week and some we can talk about on the air so we have a lot that we could go through but it is always helpful to also see what you guys are running into and where we can help you out and talk through some of these because you it's always like you get a couple different voices the next thing you know you've got a situation like oh I didn't think about that I thought it was just me but no it's actually everybody that runs into that that being said we'll let you get back to whatever it is that you're doing and hopefully uh it is working on becoming a better developer like the rest of us so go out there and have yourself a great day a great week and we will talk to you next time but oh and we didn't even touch on software so so that's that's our bonus material this one is we're gonna is switch back I totally forgot to hit you up on the software thing well we did kind of carry that conversation on in the pre conversation as well because we did get into the da Vinci and all that I did want to throw out one tidbit though from the conversation we had so as we were talking about doing the text files copying or text out doing comments and things of that nature what the additional benefit of that and spring does this really well is you can essentially hand out the template the gutted version of your code and hand to your students with essentially without the code but with the guidelines hey add this do this and now you have a tutorial or even a homework assignment that someone else could come behind you and walk through and try to do it on their own try to learn it themselves now you can still provide the solution with everything in it but some people learn from examples they have to walk through they have to do it Tri and air spring does this as well because you can actually build some of their test projects you can do in a knit or complete and the init essentially gives you all the templates all the struts it basically builds all the boiler plate code and then you can go basically build your app so basically it's like oh I I need this okay well here here here's the basics now start filling it in or it's like oh I can't quite remember how to do that say give me a complete version so it will actually fill in with real live examples and a fully functional application so you can actually hit run and there's like your rest application for your website yeah that's that's really good that reminds me we did back when I was in college there was something that was a it was a MIT project I think that was for operating systems and they were it was built so that you had all these little code modules that you could write so that they would they would have all of the boiler plate around so they could really tighten it down to write code for this and it's it's effectively which you can do in almost any language probably anything is you just have like an olude or something like that where you just say okay here's your starter app and I need you to write you know your assignment is write this function or this code and maybe and it could just be within that as you just have it commented out but basically just or around it say like you're going toite this is a function you're to create this is what it's going to do this is what's going to take this is how it works and you can test it by putting it in this code and running this application and this is what your input should be you know this input this is what your output should be so stuff like that is use those tools because that is that is a really good way to teach is to say is to as you're walking through it especially if it's a progressive kind of you know series of of lectures so you get to the point where it's like okay we're you know five lectures in here is a you know we'll say like the model solution that we've talked about but now here's a section you're worked on today so particularly like if a student gets lost on something they can see it working but they're also going to be able to like move on and not be blocked from whatever the lesson is that day so uh I think that makes this a good time to wrap this one up from a video side and then we're just going to flip on to the other side and we're going to figure out what we want to do next and where we want to go uh episode wise so ta for now we will see you next time around and uh we'll figure out what we're going to talk about then and we're just going to keep on going because that's what we do have a good one everybody [Music]
Transcript Segments
[Music]
welcome everybody I guess since we just
hit record I should say say hello and
welcome um we are just you know we're
we're as always we're heavily scripted
here so I just hit the record button
it's like oh yeah I guess we should say
hi to all of you guys that have have
joined us as we're trying to figure out
what do we want to talk about in our
podcast today um I do want to give like
a little little bonus thing
um went back and was listening to uh the
podcast for like recent episodes uh
since we like and I haven't done that
much in the last I don't know several
weeks and I was going to give you a
little feedback and it's actually so I
was thinking about it and I was going to
do it off you know off air off camera
but I was think you know it may be
something good for anybody that's been
doing
podcasting or wants to get into
podcasting because it is a um it is a
it's a it's an acquired skill I think I
mean some people are natural to it but
like like some people are just born with
like radio voice and some of that kind
of stuff but most people people and
you'll see this with any other really
any other podcast series like you want
to go back and look at like Gary
vaynerchuk when he was doing his
original like the first 100 episodes of
Wine Library TV he's still he's still
Gary He's still like a little over the
top and F bombs everywhere and some
stuff like that but he wasn't the same
until you get it like I don't know four
500 episodes in like Tim Ferris the same
one you go back to the very early stuff
it's nothing like the of course now he's
got like you know heavily produced
stuff and so what I was doing is
listening to you and I in our
interactions and this brought up you
know a couple of things that how I've
seen myself grow and change especially
as we went to this format and then also
you as I've talked to you before we've
done stuff and then also you doing some
of the original like we call it the
pilot the unaired pilot episodes that
you did and then as we got into that uh
one of the things that's always been
that we've talked about a lot over over
time is from a from a podcast view is
getting away from um a lecture kind of
thing is is because you want to engage
with the the audience yes you people out
there you want to engage with them even
though they're not there and so one of
the things that I think has helped
immensely is this is that we're actually
talking to somebody I noticed it for
myself when I did when I went to video
instead of pure audio but I went to
video um interviews even though I didn't
record it I didn't I didn't send the
video out just the fact of talking to
somebody and being able to see them you
know in this virtual sense my mic just
keeps like popping out wants to show
itself there
um that it would just it was one of
those things that it it suddenly became
less
um rigid or something like that so
there's a little personality that came
out of
I was noticing that listen to you is
like is that um it is funny because it's
like I've done this for a while and
you've done this for all of you know a
very short period of time and I've
gotten so i' especially in this I'm a
little more animated I you know I have a
lot of fun and you're still I think what
you're the the way we talked about and
because Natalie and I
were were assessing ourselves and and
where we're at stuff like that is it's
it's really it's almost like um feel
free to slow down
because I don't and I I was actually
surprised I was like should I like no
you like I I guess have done this enough
that I still enunciate very well even
when I talk really really fast I can
still get the words
out but I think you're you're try I
think and maybe part of it is you sort
of match my speed a little bit but then
it throws you off because that's not
natural to you or at least it's not yet
and so when we go through particularly
like I throw something out to you it's
like hey what do you think is feel free
to like slow it down a little bit and it
goes back to actually what we talked
about when we were working on the the
Sprint QA
stuff is having to there we had to
really slow down and enunciate because
we talking every a lot of people they
were like English as a second language
and so it was it was blowing their heads
up to try to keep up with us when we
started rolling and so it's just a
little feedback there I hope that you
know it's I hope you you see where we're
going with that and we'll just sort of
see it's I hate doing it in a sense
because it's very generic but I'm hoping
that it's something that connects
because it took it we were talking about
for a little bit like what what are the
pluses the pros and the cons and the
pluses the minuses and how this change
in format has adjusted stuff um and and
listening to you and listening to me and
stuff like that I was trying to figure
out like the best way to describe it so
hopefully that makes some level of sense
to you just a you know as a helpful hint
kind of
thing yeah and it happens a lot
especially kind of with you and me you
know when we get excited about a topic
or we really get into something you tend
to forget you're talking to people
sometimes because you're not really
interacting with them um face to face so
it's like whoops I I may have just
rambled off a whole bunch of stuff
really quickly it's like uhoh but you
can't necessarily roll it back uh in a
presentation like this so you have to
kind of watch that and I do try to keep
keep it Tempo but there are times where
it's like oh it's an exciting topic and
I forget and and you do too I mean we
all do but like you said that you've
done enough of these where you're
comfortable enough to pronun you know
pronunciate and speak literally enough
the other thing too I think is I've
tried to use my
mic uh my big pop mic like you and it
hasn't come through as well on the
MacBook uh so actually had to go to just
using the MacBook for our podcasts right
now so you're using so you're using your
MacBook mic as opposed to your your you
know USB mic or your other mic yeah uh
today I'm actually using the headphones
because I'm not at home uh but typically
it's just the laptop I'm just speaking
into it you're coming out of the
speakers and it's just
one that's funny that's actually a neat
little side note I've I've tried when I
first worked with this stuff when I was
testing stuff my MacBook was not bad it
like I would use my MacBook and this is
you know 15 years ago almost
now um this is back when I was going to
create a audio book before I wrote the
book I was like I don't want to write
that's too much work I'm just going to
speak and I realized that speaking
sucked it didn't work for me so for that
piece but my mic was really good I could
do it and it sounded great since then
I've gotten so I've you know I've used
my mic I've had this mic for year well
this one is newer but the before that I
used a you know an external mic and when
I would go back it didn't it like didn't
sound right things weren't coming
through right and so now if I try to go
back like I had I had a mic break on me
not too long ago when the wires was
wonky or whatever and I was talking
through my my laptop and everybody's
like I can't hear you I can't understand
so I don't know if the mic had move
maybe the mic is just I haven't used it
enough and it's like Got dirt in it or
something like that but your sound it's
it's it's because I I feel like I need
to have a microphone a separate
microphone and yeah yours you know
obviously yours works awesome because it
it sounds good so it's uh it's funny I
wonder how much of that is like and
yours is a u your laptop is a the
whatever the M1 right M1 yeah it's the
first gen yeah and this
is there's a trick to this though so
there there is a trick to it uh
especially if you have an external one
and go back and forth your internal
settings do not necessarily flip over to
the new mic so your other mic settings
might be applied to the local desktop
mic and it may not sync so I always make
sure that if I'm switching I go into
like Zoom or whatever the recording is
first I open up systems and I make sure
everything's Max and then I go into zoom
and then I tweak Zoom to be happy with
me speaking uh
so another little bonus I guess for
those yeah there you go boys and girls
you got two for one today um because a
lot of times especially with like slack
or things like that they take their own
audio settings and there's a lot of
times where like it switches on me where
I've always used like the desktop or I
use my pop mic but then I all of a
sudden I'm in the call and it's using
the desktop it's like okay this is
strange so I've always gotten the if I'm
doing a presentation or a recording to
always check the settings first if I'm
in a new environment uh but essentially
what you do especially like for
something like Zoom go into your system
set everything to Max then go into your
tool and tweak it from the program uh I
I've noticed that if you do it that way
you get better you get a better audio
experience in general than if you try to
let the software uh bump it up versus
the Hardware bump it up those are good
points and that actually gives me an
idea for a podcast for this one is um I
don't think we've talked about the I
think we've talked about it here and
there but I don't think we've it's ever
been a podcast type uh thing and I don't
know if we've even written an article I
think it just came up in Prior like
Mastermind stuff and it is the idea of
um essentially doing a presentation or
speaking you know like if you're going
to do like a uh like a Meetup or you're
doing some sort of presentation or
something like that or or even like you
know if you've got a class that you're
teaching and it's particularly if it's
not your home you know class and
environment some of the things about how
do you do it like what are some cool
thing good things to know when you're
going to demo software when you're going
to present something because that like
those are perfect points it's like hey
get in there and like plug all your crap
up and make sure that you've got all
your settings right for that environment
because in inevitably as you know well
and you're like the master of that I
don't want to steal the spoiler but you
you've got like four million little plug
types because you're always going to
have whatever plug you need you're not
going to have unless you have all of
them basically so um how about that for
a and I'll just like we'll see where it
goes but I was saying hey that could be
a pretty good episode what you I like
that one um we'll see how it goes I may
have some bonus material at the end for
some additional audio software and tools
that we could use um we it just depend
where the conversation goes but if we
get to the end and we haven't really
touched on any uh software bum me if I
don't remember it um just kind of ping
me on that and we'll kind of throw that
as the bonus because I got a couple
ideas on that yeah because we can do
that because actually me and my son my
my youngest son is going into um video
production and stuff like that and he's
special effects is where he wants to go
so he's spent the last couple of years
doing that kind of stuff and he we were
talking actually about adobe's Suite of
stuff because he's as a student he gets
it free so he uses
um um Premiere is there you the primary
thing he does and he says and everything
plugs right into that so he uses that
quite a bit and I was I was talking a
little bit about you know audio side and
he goes well actually you can do all
that within Premiere and then he
mentioned the other one that everybody
uses is the one that you mentioned um
you always use um it's an artist name I
think um audacity or uh it's um it's not
iMovie it
is no
um
uh is
it I want to say it's like Michelangelo
but it's not Michelangelo it's something
like that I think it's a name it's it's
video Da Vinci D Vinci D Vinci there we
go I was like I knew it was something
like that and he said oh yeah Da Vinci
is great and I said yeah actually
Michael's been telling me for a long
time that that's you know awesome and we
started talking about I guess there's
plugins for all this stuff I didn't even
know all the stuff that's in there and
so funny with
that um like you know I've actually gone
back to just using iMovie I've actually
figured out how to use its audio editor
to do a lot of the manipulation I need
there and I don't ever get out of iMovie
for anything now yeah for the for the
YouTube stuff I got so I never got out
of it I didn't I got what I needed
because really all I needed was um to
level it to a certain point so it was
usually so it was loud enough and then
after that it was fine you know I was I
had all my settings on my mics enough so
I didn't have to do a whole lot of stuff
and I didn't a I never almost never
edited the audio purely I would just if
I needed to pull something else I could
just pull out you know like a whole
section of video plus audio so the only
time I went into Audio Only was I used
you know Adobe edition forever for the
podcast for the purely I still do it
with iMovie because essentially what I
do is I just extract the audio from
podcast section extend the video
portions drop in the intro and outro and
then I can actually add the faders to
those attach them and Export the audio
so I never get out of iMovie now it it
really cuts down on a lot of the time it
takes to do a lot of our edits for our
videos and our
production
yep lots of good points so we will
definitely throw this out to you so
hello and welcome back we are continuing
our season 21 of of the building better
developers develop a newer podcast this
episode we're going to talk about uh
presenting and demos and not as much
about maybe not so much about the
technical stuff although we will get
into that a little bit but more about
the non-technical things and the things
that you will do that will shoot
yourself in the foot if you don't like
go at it with the right attitude or if
you assume because assume you know what
they always say is if you assume
something you're going to look like crap
in front of your boss or somebody like
that so we're going to talk about that
this episode but first I got to
introduce myself because that's what I
do I am Rob Broadhead I am one of the
founders of develop andur also the
founder of RB
Consulting um you can check us out on
the web and all that kind of good stuff
basically develop andur is where we we
build better developers ARB Consulting
is we take those developers and we go
out and we solve problems and leverage
technology to simplify automate
integrate all that good stuff but the
other thing we do is we talk to Michael
all the time and I'm actually using his
name shoot I was going to make him
introduce more but I'll at least tease
that that's his first name go ahead and
finish up that introduction hey everyone
my name is Michael MOS another
co-founder of developer Nur I'm also the
founder of Envision QA where we have
small to midsize businesses and small
Healthcare clinicians build software and
test software for existing
applications so I want to talk about
presentations in because we actually
beforehand for those of you that are
here and watching us hey you already
know this so sorry to be repetitive
redundant but we were talking about like
some of the things we've run into
particularly from a a techn a technical
point of view and we've talked about
microphones and some things like that
one of the things that and that's what
triggered this episode was how many
times I have gone to a demo of some sort
where I have either I am presenting I am
the presenter or I am watching somebody
present and this includes um demos it
includes some you know speakers usually
not a huge place you know but it's if
you go to like meetups or smaller
conferences like the side rooms and
conferences and stuff like that and
actually even back to you know college
days when somebody would come in that
was a a guest speaker or something like
that anytime you go into an environment
that you don't own that you don't know
then there are some things that you need
to be aware of and these things are
going to help you you know speed your
way through it and make it look smooth
even if honestly even if it's not
because you're going to get the stuff
smoothed out before you have witnesses
to the event now one of the things
is bring get all of your stuff that
you're going to use to present get there
early depending on how it is usually at
least like 15 minutes to usually more
like a half hour to 45 minutes early I
would say early enough think about what
if you show up and you have to run to
the store to get
something what kind of time frame do you
need to be able to do that and still be
able to do your presentation because I
have literally had that happen I have
seen that happen many times where
somebody gets there and it's like oh the
remote that you really need for your
presentation it had batteries and
they're dead and so now you got to run
down this the corner store or wherever
it's at and go get batteries just so
because nobody has spares it's things
like that that happen it is Murphy's law
where if it can go bad if it can go
wrong it will this includes things like
you're going to go to a very modern
place with modern tools and you're going
to find out that the only way that they
have to connect from your video to your
laptop is I don't know like jumper
cables or something weird like that
they're going to have something that's
just so backwards or so brand new that
it's like oh my gosh I didn't even think
about this I will give you a really
quick example and not to like put
somebody on the spot but hey I just
recently got married and we the night
before put all our audio stuff together
and we had it like we figured it out it
was somebody it was a whole somebody
else's
place and it was such a mess that it was
just like okay I'm going to take a phone
iPhone common iPhone we're going to plug
it in we're just going to run the music
through that awesome worked tested out
everything's great next day come in and
the guy that's the DJ had not done that
he didn't show up beforehand he had a
newer iPhone so where we had everything
we needed for the old uh you know non
USBC or whatever it the the original
Apple or the most recent one back Apple
plug he didn't have that and so we ended
up spending they ended up actually
spending time trying to find a way to
get a dongle into that and finally they
had to find somebody else's phone and
copy stuff over and it was just it was a
mess it was all because assumptions
because it's like oh it should be fine
don't ever trust anybody else to do it
use your equipment check it out before I
throw this over to Michael I will go one
more
step outside of that technical side if
you're doing a demo if you're doing a
especially if it's a sales presentation
or if it's a class that you're teaching
one make sure you have your slides
whatever they are make sure you check
your slides for things like I don't know
spelling errors and stuff like that like
just run through the make sure you're
running through them verify that they're
okay make sure that they're in order
make sure that you didn't lose some make
sure that you have like I always have
like a folder that I make specifically
for that beforehand and then when I get
there the first thing I do is I open
that folder and make sure that all the
stuff I need is in there so you're not
searching your drive for it you're not
suddenly like oh crap I need I put it on
Dropbox and it disconnected on me this
morning or something like that it
doesn't hurt to even have it like on a
little USB drive that you could plug in
as a
backup and don't change anything if it's
especially if it's code like seal that
code off put it somewhere so it is
Standalone so that you don't touch it
and nobody else touches it because I
don't know how many times I've gone in
to do that like last minute change and
everything's wrong and it's just ruins
the whole thing now I'm going to take a
deep breath and I'm going to let Michael
share his experiences and his thoughts
on this because I know you sir have done
this a few times as well uh especially
with your educational background I bet
you got some great stories well it's
funny because you know I was at your
wedding and me and Renee both commented
that you know your bag of tricks is
sitting at the house with the dogs
otherwise you could probably fix their
problem in about five minutes given the
problem I don't go anywhere without my
bag of tricks so I'm one of those um I
get not uh paranoid people that you know
I'm afraid I'm going to go into a
situation for a presentation a meeting
whatever and there's been way too many
times where things break or it doesn't
work or to Rob's point the code broke or
changed and now you can't present so a
lot of things that I've learned over the
years have let me give you a few little
tidbits so to build on Rob's Point um
you could be like me and basically go
buy a cookie cutter everything that you
always need with you and just carry it
with you uh there's enough of these
little um pocket or even wallet size uh
kits you can get for a lot of your USB
cables um micro HDMI HDMI and they're
all USB plugins it's kind of really cool
uh but if you don't want to go that
route if you're going into like a call
presentation we kind of talked about
this before jumping into the podcast you
always want to make sure that you are
familiar with the tools that you're
using so for instance we're using Zoom
to record our call here so the cool
thing with this
is zoom has its own capabilities at the
start of every call you can say test m
my sound settings test my video settings
and you click that and then you can make
sure you can hear the audio coming out
of the call you can also test your mic
make sure you can hear yourself coming
out of your
mic behind that though that so that is
more of a
software adjustment tool to using your
internal audio and um
microphone within your operating system
or whatever machine you're using there
are machine
level uh applications for your specific
operating systems Windows Mac whatever
and you need to also make sure that
those are configured correctly as well
because if you have your sound turned
way down on your mic at the hardware
level it doesn't matter how good your
software is it's not going to really be
able to boost your audio that well that
being said if you go to the hardware
Direction where you get like these
external microphones like me and rob you
use or use your desktop audio you again
need to make sure you have the right
drivers you need to make sure that the
software that comes with those works and
if you're using like soundboards and
things of that nature you want to make
sure that you mark where your settings
are for your calls because if someone
comes in and changes that now you're
going to be spending hours trying to get
that setup
again now to carry this one step further
um so you take from the setup approach
anytime I go anywhere uh like Rob said
if you have a presentation or something
like that make sure you have a backup so
typically I will always print whatever I
take with me I still have paper copies
but I also carry an iPad which also has
a downloaded copy of the document and I
have my MacBook with me which has a
physical copy of the file in case both
of those fail I also have a backup on my
keychain I have a USB uh little thumb
drive that's just sits on my keychain in
case of emergencies I always throw a
file on there if I'm going to go
present right there you now have four
places where you have your presentation
so if you fail at that point it's out of
your hands there's just nothing you can
do but if you at least have the paper
and you can't plug in you can still have
your notes you can still talk and
present the material to people and you
should be okay to do that now if you're
in a big Auditorium you might lose your
voice because you're going to have to
shout very loud if nothing works but hey
it can be
done carry that over a little bit more
with the presentation so you talked
about the code you know don't make
changes to the code with the
presentation piece what I've had to do
in the past is if you have code that is
kind of a work in progress or a proof of
concept sometimes it's better to take
screenshots of that code or mockups of
that code and throw it into something
like
PowerPoint uh or something like
presentation where you can actually mock
it up make it look userfriendly and if
you're really good at it you can do it
in such a way that your slides go with
the way you click the application so
like if you click a button to change the
screen the next slide would basically be
click oh hey this is what it would look
like so you can still make an
interactive presentation as if you're
doing a real live demo so that's another
way you can kind of set yourself up for
success in case something fails or the
application isn't ready and the last
thing I'll kind of note on before I pass
it back to you Rob
is your machine so I mentioned that I
have multiple copies and backups I also
carry my bag of tricks with me
because in my situation I everything I
have is Mac based so what's cool about
that is if you use iCloud or again you
keep backups of your copies on
everything most of your USB or even
cloud-based streaming apps work so in my
case I actually also carry with me a um
was it a Google Play stick I carry an
Amazon stick and I also have an Apple TV
I carry with me when I
travel in those situations if you don't
have anything to plug into for a
presentation you can potentially stream
it to whatever uh it is that you're
working out so if you have a TV you can
just plug it into a TV and stream it to
a TV across the room so that's another
way that you can actually save yourself
some hassle if you're walking into an
unknown situation if you know they have
TVs then bring your own streaming
service so you can actually stream to
those
TVs Rob I'll pass it back over to you
those are a lot of great points I do
want
to I do want to hit on
the um you know having a PowerPoint or
something like that if you're doing even
if you're doing a code demo
unless the point or unless like a key
part of the demo
is how does it is showing it working
live I would work I would go with a a
point and like a clickable demo set up a
couple of you know even if it's I've
done it off of an existing application
because you don't want to spend all day
you you don't want to spend a lot of
time essentially Reinventing the wheel
to have a demo but what I have done that
has worked really well is I've gone in
and I've done just take screenshots
of a of an of an application and then I
can either I can even I can set it up so
I could just I've done it as simple as
just HTML Pages it's a clickable image
and when you click on it it doesn't
matter that you clicked on that button
or not it's going to go to the next page
because I can control that I'm not gonna
let anybody else play with it I'm good
and I know exactly what it's going to do
I don't care about the data because and
that is the nice thing about a clickable
demo is being able to stick to the story
that you want to tell that is a bonus
one is don't ever if you're on a live
application of any waveform or fashion
don't ever go with the somebody in the
audience says hey could you do this
either say you take a look into it or
yes we can but that's not part of this
demo or I'll talk to you offline or
something like that because as soon as
you do and almost always that's going to
be the thing that breaks your entire
application breaks your demo throws a
whole thing just like it goes completely
off the rails so
and honestly can lose you Confidence
from your your audience because you're
showing you're telling them in a story
and saying this is how it works and this
is all this good stuff and this is all
great until you like they say well hey
try this you're like oh yeah we can do
that and then bam you just lost
credibility because you thought you
could and even if you say I don't know
that we can but hey let's try that
that's awesome if you're in the middle
of like a testing demonstration and you
want to be able to test this thing and
you want to beat on the the whole point
is to break it awesome if that's not
your goal then don't take that on even
if you
are 100% sure which you're never you're
99.999999% sure that that's going to
work if you haven't tested it if you
haven't verified it if that is not part
of your script do not go off script it
is like it is one of those things it's
like a golden rule for Pol policians
when they're out there stumping that's
why it's speech speech speech you know
like script script script they script
everything do the same thing because
when you start going off script it's
real easy to get off track and to and to
break something so I wanna I'll give you
last words here well I want to take on
to that because um when we were teaching
so if you are presenting or teaching
code something else that's very
beneficial especially for the recipient
or the student as they're watching and
it's also good for you for post
presentation is copy all your code into
notepad into a text file and then
streamline your application that you're
demoing to just comments so now as
you're walking through don't type the
code go copy it from your text and paste
it in at each step and then walk through
what you're doing this helps address two
things one one none of us write code
well when someone's standing over our
shoulders we have typos we have grammar
mistakes we just get nervous and things
just go off the rails two you might
forget something and having the code
right there it's like oh yeah I need
that so you you don't miss a step so now
you don't break your train of thought or
the conversation as you're walking
through the presentation what are your
thoughts on that
rout I agree that's I think that is the
best way to help yourself out is to have
comments either have it commented out if
you want to do something that's a like a
progressive kind of lecture you know
where it's like okay first we're going
to do this these couple of lines and
then we're going to do these things is
either like I always either have it in a
SE like you know step one step two step
three code file so I'm executing
different files or I have I have had
some especially if you've got like block
comments that makes it easy because it's
like okay now this is uncommented now
I'm going to uncomment these three lines
and then you can talk through it as you
go and then the other thing which is
honestly what I've done probably more
often than anything is I will I'll have
my full code in one file and then I'm
basically rebuilding it but like you
said I'm not going to type it this is
way too easy especially if you're in a
language that is case sensitive or space
sensitive or anything like that it is
way too easy to get like type one thing
off or you know mistype a a variable
name or something and you go through the
whole thing and then you you end up
spending sometimes you know 20 minutes
chasing down a typo just you know be
safe like test that code write it
beforehand test it make sure and that's
honestly I think that is one of the
biggest things that I see if you go out
to really any tutorial boot camp
education site go to you know UD Demi or
anything like that if you look the code
the comments on anything that's code
related almost always you're going to
get people there a bunch it doesn't work
code doesn't work code doesn't work and
sometimes it's very simple it's like hey
your code doesn't work because you
forgot this now sometimes it is more
important it's like the code doesn't
work because you didn't you forgot to
mention that there's this other thing
you did or there's this way that you
need to set up your environment so
that's why you know that's why we when
we do this a lot of times start from
scratch of like okay there's somewhere
along the way here's where we built that
environment now it may be you know six
months down the road we're teaching
stuff but it's like if you're struggling
remember go back to day one here's the
notes here's what you need to do to get
it
right what you need to do to get it
right is give us feedback is let us know
info developer or.com check us out at
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to hear back from you we would love to
get feedback and just let us know what
kind of problems you're running into
because yeah we obviously have problems
every week and some we can talk about on
the air so we have a lot that we could
go through but it is always helpful to
also see what you guys are running into
and where we can help you out and talk
through some of these because you it's
always like you get a couple different
voices the next thing you know you've
got a situation like oh I didn't think
about that I thought it was just me but
no it's actually everybody that runs
into that that being said we'll let you
get back to whatever it is that you're
doing and hopefully uh it is working on
becoming a better developer like the
rest of us so go out there and have
yourself a great day a great week and we
will talk to you next
time but oh and we didn't even touch on
software
so so that's that's our bonus material
this one is we're gonna is switch back I
totally forgot to hit you up on the
software thing well we did kind of carry
that conversation on in the pre
conversation as well because we did get
into the da Vinci and all that I did
want to throw out one tidbit though from
the conversation we had so as we were
talking about doing the text files
copying or text out doing comments and
things of that nature what the
additional benefit of that and spring
does this really well is you can
essentially hand out the template the
gutted version of your code and hand to
your students with
essentially without the code but with
the guidelines hey add this do this and
now you have a tutorial or even a
homework assignment that someone else
could come behind you and walk through
and try to do it on their own try to
learn it themselves now you can still
provide the solution with everything in
it but some people learn from examples
they have to walk through they have to
do it Tri and air spring does this as
well because you can actually build some
of their test projects you can do in a
knit or complete and the init
essentially gives you all the templates
all the struts it basically builds all
the boiler plate code and then you can
go basically build your app so basically
it's like oh I I need this okay well
here here here's the basics now start
filling it in or it's like oh I can't
quite remember how to do that say give
me a complete version so it will
actually fill in with real live examples
and a fully functional application so
you can actually hit run and there's
like your rest application for your
website
yeah that's that's really good that
reminds me we did back when I was in
college there was something that was a
it was a MIT project I think that was
for operating systems and they were it
was built so that you had all these
little code modules that you could write
so that they would they would have all
of the boiler plate around so they could
really tighten it down to write code for
this and it's it's effectively which you
can do in almost any language probably
anything is you just have like an olude
or something like that where you just
say okay here's your starter app and I
need you to write you know your
assignment is write this function or
this code and maybe and it could just be
within that as you just have it
commented out but basically just or
around it say like you're going toite
this is a function you're to create this
is what it's going to do this is what's
going to take this is how it works and
you can test it by putting it in this
code and running this application and
this is what your input should be you
know this input this is what your output
should be so stuff like that is use
those tools because that is that is a
really good way to teach is to say is to
as you're walking through it especially
if it's a progressive kind of you know
series of of
lectures so you get to the point where
it's like okay we're you know five
lectures in here is a you know we'll say
like the model solution that we've
talked about but now here's a section
you're worked on today so particularly
like if a student gets lost on something
they can see it working but they're also
going to be able to like move on and not
be blocked from whatever the lesson is
that day
so uh I think that makes this a good
time to wrap this one up from a video
side and then we're just going to flip
on to the other side and we're going to
figure out what we want to do next and
where we want to go uh episode wise so
ta for now we will see you next time
around and uh we'll figure out what
we're going to talk about then and we're
just going to keep on going because
that's what we do have a good one
everybody
[Music]