The Mobile Presenter

FOSDEM is Europe's biggest open source conference. It's organised entirely by the community and in addition to being about all things being free as in freedom, it's also free as in beer, i.e. there are no entrance fees (although donations are welcome). For over 10 years now, literally thousands of geeks from all over Europe assemble in Brussels on the first weekend in February every year

I'll be attending FOSDEM again this year (Feb 2+3). I will also be giving a short presentation: a 15 minute lightning talk in the Testing and Automation devroom. The title is "What's our Status?" and this is what I submitted as the talk's summary:

Here's a tip when designing your slides: Stay away from the edges. By which I mean that you shouldn't put anything important near the four edges (left, right, top or bottom) of the slide as it may be cut off when the slide is projected.

You've probably seen them, too: Slides that have a photo on the right - and a list of bullet points on the left. They're neither fish nor fowl - slides that are halfway there, but that indicate that the presenter couldn't quite let go of bullet points yet.

These sorts of slides are both good and bad news.

When trying to explain that there is a better way to do presentations, people often agree - only to find excuses why they are not doing it that way (yet). The 3 most common excuses I keep hearing are:

1. I don't have the time
2. I can't use photos for this topic
3. My audience wants numbers

I attend and speak at a lot of tech conferences. Over time, I noticed that some presentations work better than others. This triggered me to look into the theory behind presentations, especially since nobody ever told me how to do it - I was only copying what everybody else seemed to be doing.

Eventually, I came across Garr Reynolds and his Presentation Zen approach. These days, you can see more and more highly visual presentations, obviously inspired by the Presentation Zen approach, being given at conferences - but mostly for keynotes and other non-technical talks.

The typical tech talk in 2012, however, is still dominated by bullet points. But it doesn't have to be this way. Part of the motivation for the blog you're reading was to help spread the message There is a better way to do presentations! to the tech and geek communities, which led to the "Presenting for Geeks" workshops, which led to "Presenting for Geeks" - The Ebook.

So I am very happy to announce that my first ebook, Presenting for Geeks, is now available.

Update 2026: At this point, all my ebooks are only available via Tolino.