[Chennaipy] An Idea for Lightning talks

[Shrayas rajagopal]

On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Shrikant Giridhar
<shrikantgiridhar at gmail.com> wrote:

[...]

> With this context, I was wondering if it would be a good idea for
> prospective
> speakers to take up such small snippets of interesting (and suitably
> licensed)
> Python code and present a short walkthrough in one of the lightning talks?

A great idea.

One more thing that I think would be awesome would be to take parts of
open source projects and just walk people through how one or a few
APIs from that library work.

> Usually, I am not a fan of having large chunks of code on slides but I feel
> this could work if handled well i.e. by usefully annotating the trickier
> parts, adding other references and by not getting lost in the specific
> nuances of implementation, rather focusing on the bigger ideas and how they
> map to Pythonic idioms.

Abstraction, Abstraction, Abstraction.

[...]

> One stumbling block I can see at the moment is the lack of a metric to judge
> what
> code is worth presenting. People would (understandably) disagree on what
> they
> deem to be good code and without an objective metric, the whole idea would
> be
> useless.

Well, I don't think there *needs* to be a metric, per se? Talks are
all about sharing one's own experience. Definitely a piece of code
that interested me might not interest you but it has a great
probability to interest another bunch of people and lead to a great
conversation. And well, great conversations can go a really long way
:)

> Also, it requires a certain amount of experience and 'taste' to pick which
> parts
> of code are the ones with the cool stuff and what is just labor to get work
> done.
> This, obviously, demands much of the speaker and requires good judgment on
> their
> part to not lose sight of the forest for the trees.

Its all about experience. The thing here is to keep trying. No one
will be able to get the taste in the first shot. The point is to keep
at it, consistently with a goal of wanting to do things for _oneself_
first and then for the masses. If you believe in something enough,
that passion will leak to the audience, I assure you.

> Anyways, I am just throwing an idea into the pot. I'm interested in reading
> what
> others think of this!

Wonderful thought :) You could start it off by giving a talk this month!

Cheers.