This years Berlin Expert Days conference has come to an end. The BEDCon is a small tech conference in, you guessed it, Berlin. The focus is somewhere around the Java ecosystem but it is no LASER sharp focus.
This years BEDCon was full of high quality talks and interesting attendies. The conference sold out with somewhere around 350 people and although some talks were a bit crowded, the atmosphere was very nice and friendly! Thanks to everyone who contributed in one way or another! I had a great time.
Why Coffee is good for developers
This was the first conference, where I attended as a speaker. I gave a (hopefully) entertaining introduction to CoffeeScript on the second day titled Why Coffee is good for developers. And judging by the feedback I got in person and via twitter, the talk was a huge success. Thanks to everyone who attended! I hope you had as much fun listening as I had giving the talk!
I opened my talk with some facts about actual coffee as a pun on the title of the talk before spinning into CoffeeScript and the problems, it tries to solve. Some people told me, they liked the idea and also enjoyed my facts about coffee. Although one person aparently didn’t liked it at all. He left before I even got to the interesting parts probably thinking, I was talking about coffee for an hour. Maybe he is more of a tea guy :)
HTML slides are gaining traction
My slides are available online and the sources are on github too (Sorry, slides are in german.) The slides work best in Safari but should also work in Chrome. Non-WebKit Browsers are probably going to have some problems. Since a few people have asked me, I made the slides with my own custom fork of the fabulous impress.js. I rewrote it in CoffeeScript and modified it quite a bit for this presentation. If you plan to use it, at this moment, I have to recomment using impress.js over my fork. I plan to put some more effort into my fork and iron out many of the wrinkles. But at the moment, impress.js is more stable and more active. I’ll post here when there are news about my fork.
I was by far not the only speaker with HTML slides. An intersting trend, that I really do appreciate. HTML slides tend to be less bullet point ridden than powerpoint slides. The presentations are often more interactive and engaging. The slides are easier and faster to share after the talk and they discourage the stupid idea of printing out slides. But as impress.js calls out in its readme, they “may not help you if you have nothing interesting to say ;)”
One other framework for HTML slides, that looked very intersting was reveal.js. Alexander Reelsen used it for his slides and they looked great. But then again, he also hat something interesting to say…
If you have anything to do with the web at all, check out one of the options for HTML slides! Not only is it fun to create the slides, it is also a nice exercise for your web-fu! And you can use IntelliJ instead of PowerPoint for creating slides - how awesome is that?!