My code camp presentation last weekend went better than I expected. Over the past month the presentation evolved from “Writing a IL disassebler for fun” to what I thought would be more interesting “Disassembling for fun”. There are three main sections to the presentation:
- Defining disassembling
- Applied diasassembling
- Writing a disassembler
The presentation was top-down approach. People who were interested in what a disassembler is and how they are used only stayed for the those parts of the presentation. The hard core geek stayed for the detail about writing a disassembler... which worked out great that time of night on Saturday. I was actually surprised at how many people attended.
I put the presentation together targeting an audience that was 80% experienced with disassemblers/20% not experienced ... which turned out to be back wards from the crowd that attended - which means they probably got more out of it than I thought they would (or I hope anyways).
On a more personal level ...
Since I am NOT a natural speaker (I'm a pretty quiet guy), I skipped a couple of sessions that afternoon to go back to the hotel and practice the whole presentation - which seemed to have really paid off. I wasn't really nervous as I thought I might be giving the presentation. Preparing for the presentation I had followed alot of Scott Hanselman's tips and a few other tips I have picked up in the past year or two about presenting (highlight color from Don Box). I also created a specific user for the presentation so I could have all the font sizes and resolutions set ahead of time. For the command line utilities I created bat files and short cuts to them that use “%comspec% /k” to launch the command window, which helped cut down on the change directory commands.
Thanks to everyone how attended!