Presentation - Enhanced Ass-Kicking With Git
Technologies: deck.js, Git, and HTML5
Why Did I Make This?
I gave this presentation at my amazing job, (apply today!) for our monthly Developer Lunch. In it, I summarize how to configure Git to:
- bypass some of its archaic syntax
- work more efficiently
What Did I Learn?
This is the first presentation I’ve created outside of Keynote. Keynote is great software for creating powerful presentations, but as a developer, I’ve longed for the ability to create a presentation in versioned plain text. I also wanted to post the slides to my website without degrading their quality.
With that in mind, I searched for an HTML-based presentation tool. After reviewing several, I settled on deck.js. It had the best compromise between simplicity and flexibility of the tools I reviewed. Also, it had several choices of themes, which helps for non-designers such as myself.
Since the presentation is a static HTML site powered by JavaScript, I was able to simply host the project with GitHub Pages by pushing the project to the Git repository I was already going to use.
I intentionally worked counter to the common wisdom of keeping the slides minimal, to support the points that you’re making verbally for two reasons:
- The meat of the presentation are code examples, and it’s far more efficient to put these up on the screen than to read them aloud.
- I wanted this presentation to stand alone as a reference document for the developers that weren’t present and future hires.
After giving this presentation, I realize that I did a poor job of maintaining any kind of narrative of keeping in mind how to make Git do more work so you don’t have to. I provide examples of tweaks that I’ve done, but don’t instruct on how to change your thinking to come up with new tweaks and aliases. I’ll want to keep that in mind for future presentations.