Slides for Talking at Meet-ups

Topics, how-to and workshop:

Putting together a few slides to support your talk / presentation at the Drupal user group meet-ups can become a quick thing. In the process, your slides and talk can then be easily referenced the next day by those interested and can be easily shared with others who may then present at other national meet-ups.

The last two Johannesburg meet-ups I showed these two very short slideshows about, well, slide shows ;-)

• Slides with Reveal.js
  • Repo: https://github.com/RiaanBurger/slides-revealjs
  • Slides: https://riaanburger.github.io/slides-revealjs
• Slides with Reveal.js - ForkIt
  • Repo: https://github.com/RiaanBurger/slides-revealjs-forkit
  • Slides https://riaanburger.github.io/slides-revealjs-forkit

At this week's meet-up, some of us decided to put together a workshop on a Saturday or Sunday upcoming that where we'll help each other complete talks of 8 to 12 minutes with supporting slideshows. We'll then submit them to Ivan to see if they can be scheduled for upcoming Johannesburg meet-ups. Keeping the talks short means we can more easily complete them and cover more interesting topics at the meet-ups. Of course, some topics may need more time, but perhaps they are then also better broken into several short talks over a couple of weeks.

Slideshows can be a bit more work to prepare than a live demo from your development laptop. It does save you from the odd broken library that may end up with you troubleshooting live for 30min in front of a room full of people ;-) Slides, especially if well made to work well stand-alone, will also reach a wider audience.

So far we have 10 people that will come to the workshop, but do feel free to let me know if you want to come too. Those coming so far include Kurt, Robin, André, Ike, Amo, Musa, Willem, Nick, Rodney and Stefan.

For topics also we asked what people would like to know more about. We have a treasure trove of topics and this makes it much easier for those interested to speak. When you know about something, you often think everyone else does too so you don't recognise that speaking about it will help others. Feel free to request more topics here in comments, we'll pick from these so long and hopefully cover them all soon:

• Lee: Varnish
• Adam: Entity Relations and Content Filters
• Riaan: Show me some drush.rc magic
• Kurt: Theming front end topics
• Robin: Dev / Stage Live, the process
• Robin: Drupal Install Profiles
• Louis: Show & Tell, show me some examples of what Drupal can do
• Rudolf: Time/Cost of Drupal Features (a business topic)
• Amo: Sass more Sass
• Ivan: Scalable architectures (maybe a topic for a certain Drubanite ;-)
• André: Bootstrap / Foundation
• Rudi: drush (you'll notice I wrote drush, not drush, that's how it is pronounced ;-)
• Ilsoda: Front- and Back-end testing
• Willem: Development environments and workflows
• Rodney: Drupal small business how-tos
• Rodney: Costing and pricing projects
• Stefan: Security and Confidential Data
• Richard: Drupal 8: Migration
• Richard: Drupal 8: What's coming and changing

Correct me if I missed anything, add more if you need and hopefully this may also help the other meet-ups.