I went to the BCS lecture this month, this time on Ruby on Rails. Now I’m no Ruby programmer or a regular presenter, but have been to a fair few Ruby presentations (aimed also at technical users) and thought that this one was pretty awful - I wouldn’t normally blog this, but I had to explain some basic concepts to people sitting behind me that he didn’t cover or mention, and I distinctly felt that not one of the attendees walked away with anything but confusion.
The chap speaking (Jonathan Conway from a web outfit called New Bamboo) clearly knows his Ruby on Rails - don’t get me wrong, and his company has developed some nice apps, including Magnolia, but he just wasn’t prepared enough, or just a good presenter. Don’t get me wrong - I don’t make myself out to be a good presenter, but I can sure recognise a poor one when I see it.
Just a few of the issues I had:
- His presentation seemed only about 15 slides long.
- He often stood in front of the slides, blocking their view.
- He asked the audience who had used Ruby before at the start, (two hands raised) then after mention of every tool, say “has anyone used this?” - of course not if no one has used Ruby!
- He used reams of ruby in a dark blue font against black - barely visible.
- He and umm’d and err’d through his slides as if he had never seen them before in his life.
- He asked if anyone had any questions after every single slide.
- He used tons of acronyms, and didn’t expand on a single one.
- The only one he did expand on MVC (Model View Controller) he didn’t even explain what this was or why it was used.
I could go on and on!!
Topics supposed to be covered were:
- A brief overview of Ruby on Rails -
he didn’t cover or even mention some real basics, like using built-in generator scripts to generate CRUD scaffolding, why we use MVC, Action Pack, what databases it supports etc. When asked to demonstrate his over simplistic examples, he said it was too complicated to launch ruby on rails to show people. What about using the WEBrick web server that comes built-in to Ruby? - REST in Rails - totally omitted didnt mention XML, web services once. More info on REST.
- Javascript-less Javascript with RJS - basic example, but didnt show any UIs even when asked to.
- Beautiful testing with Rails - he said that he uses Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) with his customers, and showed a unit test and then a BDD test, but couldn’t say anything more than it was more beautiful to look at. At this point I had to actually raise my hand and tell people actually what BDD was and its advantages.
Right rant over - feel better now :o).
For those wanting an better introduction to Rails check here and here. For an overview of Behaviour Driven Development see my previous post on BDD.
Comments ( 4 )
Chris R added these pithy words on Apr 27 07 at 8:45 amSounds like an evening well spent then! What are the BCS events normally like? Based on nothing but prejudice I have the impression that they are not very ‘cutting edge’, for lack of a better phrase. But I’m happy to be educated otherwise…
Jonathan Conway added these pithy words on Sep 27 07 at 4:55 pmHi,
I’m sorry you didn’t like to the talk.I intentionally didn’t demonstrate scaffolding as it really represents rails in the wrong light which is one of the reasons why scaffolding in being removed in Rails 2.0. The rails community got over the whole ‘wow isn’t scaffolding cool’ 2 years ago and it saddens me everytime someone tries to bring this up as either an advantage or disadvantage of the framework.
I also didn’t give a live demonstration because I’d had a full day of work (I started at 7am that day), drove all the way from London to Oxford in traffic to give a talk out of my own pocket. As you can imagine I was extremely tired and I never code when tired let alone give a live demo.
As far as asking questions at the end of each slide, I usually run my presentations similar to group discussions and to be honest I was kind of put off as although I was using acronyms I really thought people in the BCS would at least know what MVC stood for. It’s been around since the times of Smalltalk for crying out loud.
What’s wrong with a 15 slide presentations? OK, probably rather small compared to academia but I use my slides as more of prompts for discussion.
In all of my 3 years doing presentations on Rails the BCS was the most negative audience I’d ever had the misfortune to present to and it showed in how I presented that night… I knew the BCS was a bit backward but didn’t realise how out of touch it is with anything outside of the ‘enterprise’. If I’d known I would have done a few magic tricks with datagrids;).
Al added these pithy words on Sep 27 07 at 5:41 pmHey Jonathan,
Just in Denmark at a conference, so excuse the brief response! Thanks for the comment - I think my response was a little harsh and a bit in the heat of the moment (apologies), and more the fact that I was reacting to the response of the BCS crowd’s reaction. I’m an occasional visitor to BCS (only when the talks sound interesting), and I guess I hadn’t looked at it from your viewpoint.
I guess the BCS had hyped it up to be something different, and it wasn’t quite what they thought.
You were expecting a short presentation in more of a discussion prompting format, and I now appreciate that you were knackered from a days work, and were doing this under your own steam rather than for any commercial perspective, so was more off the cuff.
I think the fact that the BCS crowd tend to be mainly academic and thus more concerned with non-web based concepts probably threw them for a bit of a loop, and the presentation was maybe a bit too high level for them. I was surprised when the guy next to me grumbled that you didn’t explain what MVC was ;o)
I think you were right - a few more demos with datagrids would have impressed them far more! With the time you had you didn’t really have enough time to go into specifics. Nothing wrong with 15 slide presentations - when in front of the right audience!!
Would love to catch up with you when you are speaking at another event, as maybe it just was the wrong presentation for the wrong crowd! Thanks for the response.
Dan added these pithy words on Oct 01 07 at 1:33 pmHey, that grumbling guy next to you was me! I’ve been a web developer for 10 years and I’ve only recently hopped on the MVC bandwagon. It turns out I’ve pretty much been using the techniques all along, just not as a result of using a framework which put a name to it.
So at Jonathan’s talk, as far as I was concerned at least, MVC was a high street shop selling overpriced music and video. So, yep, I think that perhaps the BCS mucked up by not pitching the talk right from either Jonathan’s or the audience’s perspective. I’m sure someone from the committee will stumble across this post at some point - perhaps by googling ‘don’t get me wrong’
- and let us know what they think.