By reflecting on how to do things and how things are done you realize how things are made by many components. And you realize how to do things you need to pass through several steps. Sometimes the path is linear. Some others it is not.
Writing about a process allows you to understand better how it flows, and why you need to go through step B if you want to reach C, starting from A.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
–Sherlock Holmes
Testing it, is the last thing you have to do just to confirm the deductions.
In this post no. 344 I am publishing my notes on Software Presentation.
Presenting a piece of software is a [[presentation]] so anything applicable to the art and craft of presenting can be applied to software as well.
[[Presentation]] is a [[communication]] activity so the basics are to be found in this wider field.
What are the most important things to do and to know to create and deliver an effective and efficient software presentation?
1. Define who your audience is
2. Define your audience’s background and their goal. What’s the most important thing they need to get from your presentation?
3. Define the delivery context: where, when and how is your presentation going to be delivered?
4. Define the presenters: is it you or a group of presenters? What’s their relationship? How are they sharing tasks and responsibilities?
5. How much time do you have available for the presentation? Is there going to be a Q&A session?
6. What media are suitable, accepted, required, requested for the presentation?
7. What’s the presentation outline?
8. What’s your final goal you want to achieve with this presentation?
The software to be presented
1. What’s the nature of the software to be presented?
2. What’s the design and development level?
3. If there are data-based features to demonstrate, what’s the nature of the data? What’s the data model? Is there a database involved? What about the data: is it fake, real or custom made for this presentation?
Real data vs fake data.
1. If the data is real, do you have permission to show it outside the scope of the inner workings of the software?
2. Is there any sensitive information included in the data?
3. What’s the best data configuration to support the storytelling in the presentation?
4. Do you have a local backup of the data in case the live server is not working?
Simulating a user flow vs doing it for real in the software.
1. Do you have a clearly defined set of stories to show?
2. Are you using real or test users?
3. Can you show a prototype, a mockup or a simulation instead of the real software? What are the implications of choosing a development version versus a live one?
4. Is it required to give access to the software for the attendees? Is there a dedicated and set-up environment for this controlled audience? Is there a developer following the operations and able to intervene in case of urgent needs?
Covering for features not yet implemented.
1. Can you show a mocked up user story instead of a prototype?
2. Do you have clearly identified the prerequisites, the running context, and the outcome of the stories related to the feature you are presenting?
3. Are you ready to collect feedback by accurately recording all suggestions and critiques?
4. Do you need to show multiple versions to pick one? How have you organized the sequence and the comparison? Do you need to give handouts or material illustrating complex scenarios or minute details?
I’ve found two extremes in my reflections: big moments to think about big things and little moments to think about small things.
In the top-down approach of big moments, I can face more high-level and philosophical questions concerning mainly the Why and the What.
In bottom-up moments, when I am focusing on a specific thing I am devoting my attention to the execution of tasks or their thorough explanation.
Those two extremes create fertile creative tensions between them. By going back and forth between the micro and the macro I have more occasions to make connections and to have a deeper and broader view of things.
If you write or not write, nothing is going to change today. You were about to build a habit before completing your daily task and you are confirming you are continuing your streak. There may be none or few consequences of your breach and it might matter to nobody. But you are the only one responsible for this and the only one receiver of either the benefits or the damages.
So, better put your thoughts together and, even if admitting an illusory defeat, declare your emptiness with a clear and determined voice.
Here it is, my non-article for today. It’s a free-flowing exercise, I wrote it as it came, flowing, and I didn’t go back to edit any part of it.
It is what it is. And it’s the no. 342.
If you want to be original you need first to get rid of all of your obvious things. You can born gifted, always rich in ideas and inventions but it’s more likely that you were born like any other human being. Naked, vulnerable, and clueless. Being original as in innovative is something you develop. Only by having a lot of obvious and weak ideas you can come up with interesting ideas. And that happens only if you work in the right feedback loop, by assessing the validity of your ideas by testing them against the right challenge and by learning from what you observe during that collision.
Being original, innovative means having the courage of letting go of your banality. If you have respect for yourself you do it in private. If you want to learn out of their lack of usefulness, you do it in public.
This was my 341st idea assessment in public.
Can we brand a thinking process? Think about a toy brick, a 2-by-4 piece. It’s standard, created with high precision to respects specific dimensions, shapes and feature. Now think about what you can do with that piece. Within its constrained shape it offers infinite combinatorial possibilities with multiple instances of itself. Now take a set of instructions guiding you to use a given set of those bricks to be assembled into the model of a duck. We have building blocks and instructions like we could have ingredients and recipes.
Now imagine not having any user guide and playing with pieces until you find meaningful combinations. You might discover that three pieces form a leg so you can replicate the discovered pattern to add two or more legs tonyou fantasy creature. If you write done the sequence of steps needed to reproduce the little bear you just randomly assembled you would provide instructions to replicate your model.
But what happens if you collect the ways and the approaches you came up with to build the leg pattern in the first place? You would offer creative techniques to build more complex shaped out of atomic components.
And what if you discover how to 3d print your building blocks? Or designing and creating new formats of bricks?
This is what happens when we analyze the world around us and we transform data into information and then into knowledge. We identify atoms we can clearly distinguish, we recognize patterns of aggregated blocks and we learn how to do it through the process of learning and making.
I am dreaming about mental building blocks, thinking bricks and processes and techniques to discover new ways of thinking and novel and useful combinations of existing thoughts to innovate what we know and what we can discover.
How is this thing called? What is it? Who study that? What do we know about it? How can we work on it?
It’s not your desires, your hopes, your expectations, your opinions, your impression, your intuition, your experience, your imagination, your fantasy, your speculation, your creativity, your luck.
It’s the facts doing the talking.
You need to be humble to read the language of facts in an objective way. What did actually happen? How is that different from what you wanted?
There, in that difference, you have a chance to learn, adapt, change direction, start from scratch or quit.
t least, you won’t waste further time.
There will be a time in the future when I will have organized part of my knowledge. I will be able to point at it as a tangible artifact and say, look, here is my book|website|course|software. I will feel proud although still not completely satisfied. It might be the moment when I will realize how much I have waited for that and I will ask myself: why didn’t I start earlier?
338/365.
When looking to create a new solution starting from premade pieces you need to have a precise and exhaustive inventory of all the pieces and how they can connect with each other.
Design is about finding new and useful connections. New, compared to the solutions found until now, otherwise you would have already solved the problem. Useful because they are satisfying the needs, wants and desires of the final users.
It’s not wise to try to arrange the pieces without having a clear and shared understanding of their functions and their potential for connection, it could be inefficient or, worst, harmful.