Presentation Ideas

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi, I’m going to give a talk on Rails to my campus ACM group in about two weeks. I’m trying to think of ideas. The 15 minute blog is great, and I’d kind of like to do something like that, but I can’t do better than DHH or Ryan have, and if they look into it more, they’ll come across that pretty quickly.

I can do some live examples like that, or I can do a keynote / powerpoint style presentation.

Does anyone have any ideas for something simple enough to go through in an hour, for someone with intermediate Rails skills, that would give a basic idea of how Rails works?

If you were going to give a presentation, what kinds of things would you talk about? My audience will mostly be non web developers, and the web developers that will be there will mostly be php and possibly Java. They’ll all be CS students, grad and undergrad, possibly a professor or two, but not very likely. Maybe 20-30 people.

Any ideas or advice are welcome, thanks :slight_smile: -Josh

2

Cucumber?

It could be quite quick to throw together a simple application to manage something (stocks of products) and test it using Cucumber which looks very cool when you first see it.

Cheers,

Andy

3

MVC, DRY, convention over configuration. Those are important concepts in rails. However, in a presentation a lenghtly talk about these things are probably going to be pretty boring. And its not something that student programmers may apprechiate as much as experienced programmers.

I would spend a short amount of time on that and then move on to showing actual code. Stuff that looks a bit impressive, like the ajax helpers, model validation, how to interact with the database without writing any SQL.

Josh Cheek wrote: