Background I’ve been a professional developer for twenty years. I exposed my son N to programming a couple times while he was growing up -- Scratch when he was around 8, Khan Academy javascript when he was 12. He learned it easily enough but it didn’t grab him. But his junior year in high school he had a hole in his schedule and I convinced him to try AP CS to fill it. And this time, he got hooked. He started programming for fun in the evenings. You know how it goes. Then in March 2020, Covid hit and his high school went virtual. It was a terrible experience, to the point that instead of going back for more his senior year, he took the last classes he needed to graduate over the summer, and decided to apply to programming boot camps in the fall. I think the American college system is broken , so I was happy to help evaluate his options for something different. Evaluating boot camps N and I came up with three criteria for evaluating boot camps. If they didn’t meet these three,
I just got back from PyCon, and as with all conferences where the talks are delivered by engineers instead of professional speakers, we had a mixed bag. Some talks were great; others made me get my laptop out . The most important important axiom is: a talk is not just an essay without random access. It's a different medium. Respect its strengths instead of wishing it were something it's not. Here are some concrete principles that can help: Don't read your slides Advice often repeated, too-seldom followed. This is sometimes phrased as "make eye contact with your audience," but I've seen that second version interpreted to mean, "make eye contact while reading your slides, so your head pops up and down like a gopher poking out of its hole." So just don't read your slides, no matter what else you're doing. Some good presenters go to extremes with this, with just one or two words per slide. This is fine as a stylistic embellishment, b