>> I'm Christina Warren.
>> I'm Adron Hall.
>> And this is the Open Source Show.
[MUSIC].
>> I'm Christina Warren, Senior Cloud
Developer Advocate, and I'm joined today by
>> Adron Hall, Technical Evangelist at DataStax.
>> I made a lot of videos here for Channel 9.
I give a lot of presentations,
and in my past life,
I've written reams of technical blog posts,
and we're talking today about creating technical content,
and I know that's something that you do a lot of, right?
Because you give a lot of presentations.
>> Yup.
>> You do a lot of demos. You blog a lot.
>> I do blog a lot.
>> Whether you're giving a speech or writing
a blog or making a demo,
we're all creating technical content all the time.
So, for you, what's your first biggest tip?
>> Well, the first thing is always be learning.
Always be curious, and don't ever stop learning about it.
>> It's a lot harder, I think than people think.
That when we think about creating technical content,
that's entertaining, that's also informative.
There's a lot that goes into it.
>> Learn new ways to approach your audience.
Learn new ways to put together material.
Just try to be creative,
but always keep that fire lit to keep learning.
>> That's a great point. It's really
important to know your audience.
>> Yeah.
>> Because it's really important to know
what audience you are either writing a speech for,
or writing a blog post for,
or making a video for. Agree?
>> Vastly so.
You've got to present the right material to the right audience.
So I always try to figure out
who you're going to be speaking with.
>> I think it's good to try to kind of say
what's the expertise level? Am I going even more advanced
or what is it that they're trying to get out of it.
I find that really useful for demos.
If they're trying to do a specific task,
then that's what the demos should be about,
and if it's going to be more of an introduction
to something, it should be an overview.
>> Absolutely. If you go into a group of engineers that are
super hardcore engineers and you've brought
your executive results for the quarter deck,
they're just going to be like, "No!
What do you even? Get out of here."
Your whole thing has to be oriented toward the specific audience.
>> We were talking about this before,
that we both kind of run into as you're at a presentation,
and you don't have the right connector to connect your laptop.
>> Make sure there are connectors for all the things.
You might be able to connect an HDMI or
you might need the USB-C to whatever.
But whatever type of laptops,
whether it's those or Dell, there's something
else you need to have the connectors.
So, one thing that is easy to get
is get your connectors figured out,
and always bring those with you,
and make sure you have an HDMI option,
a VGA option or whatever.
Another thing I would say is,
when you are giving a presentation,
making sure that you have backups of your presentation,
whether it's on another computer or in the cloud someplace.
Well, obviously, presentations are
a big part of technical content,
but I know you do a lot of blog posts, too.
Do you have any advice for people who are writing technical blogs?
>> Yeah. A whole bunch of it.
>> Okay.
>> I write about it sometimes.
But the first one that always comes to mind is just write.
You don't have to go and get
published on your blog, but just write.
Start writing things down,
and tell yourself a story.
Start from beginning of something and go through it,
so it becomes easier to get a rhythm,
and then the be able to produce content on a regular basis.
I just write continuously.
Probably 90 percent of it doesn't end up in the blog,
and then I can take the good parts and actually make blog posts.
But remember, you're trying to tell a story of
why you're doing that in the first place,
so just write and just tell yourself a story.
>> I totally agree. As someone who's written a lot of content,
the more you do, the easier it gets,
and the more comfortable you become with the process.
But if you are going to be doing tutorials,
run through the tutorials yourself after you've done them,
and make sure that it does what it's supposed to do.
Sometimes, that might mean rolling
up a VM and trying it from a clean system,
but actually, try it out just to make sure it works.
Because sometimes, I've definitely done this.
I'll write something, and I'm like,
"Oh no," but this worked fine.
So, you need to make sure that
you're not missing out on any prerequisites,
and that everything works the way that it's supposed to work.
>> That's huge. It could be a VM, a container,
or you have to just wipe out your machine,
fdisk it, and load the OS back on it.
I can't even tell you how many times
I've forgot to mention prereqs or something,
and I'm like, "Oh, just curl this thing,
go put this over here and run."
No, you've got to get curl first,
and you got to do the other thing.
You've got to set up the stuff.
You're just going to dive in and say like,
I have this IDE and I have these tools installed,
is a huge thing that you need to do.
Awesome. Awesome. Trying it out on a fresh system and
making sure that the tutorial works as
expected is really important.
Well, okay, so I think we've given people kind of a good overview.
Do you have any places people can go to find information?
>> Yeah. So, there's my blog, compositecode.blog,
but you can also read about what other people go through to write.
Could be a fiction writer or whatever.
They usually have all sorts of stories about what they've
gone through to get better at
actually being able to produce content.
But check out.NET Fringe, Node PDX,
and recently we just held ML4ALL,
down in Portland, Oregon,
partly because I was one of the conference organizers,
and we really tried to work with our speakers,
and make sure that it's as
easy as possible for them to really provide good content.
There was a lot of absolutely spectacular content there,
and you can pick up a lot of tips from that,
just watching people present.
Awesome. So check out the links below in the show notes.
We're going to have links to Adron's blog as well as
some other resources for creating good presentations,
giving good demos, some other content out there.
You also could go to opensource.microsoft.com if you
want to check out more about what we're doing with open source,
and like and subscribe this video because-
>> I think it's over there.
>> It's somewhere. It's somewhere.
Well, then like and subscribe, turn on
the notifications, and we will see you next time.
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