How to present your Code

10 February 2023

Over the years I have noticed a familiar pattern while attending various tech talks or internal Company talks in the industry – After setting the scene, mostly via powerpoint, and making interesting points about a new technology/concept we hit the bullet point called “live demo”. The speaker switches out of powerpoint, opens his Code editor – and puts the whole audience collectively to sleep at the exact same point in time. It doesn’t have to be this way, read along to find out how to gently guide your audience through your Code with these 5 tips.

(Disclaimer, I’m using IntelliJ IDEA for this, but I think similar features should be available for most state of the art editors).

1) Use a theme that is easy on the eyes

Be aware of the fact that the audience may consist of people that don’t stare at an IDEA for 8+ hours a day. If you hit them with your fancy theme that’s barely readable for your developer friends, they are going to cry. Stick to something simple: Light, Dark / Dracula or High Contrast. Depending on where you present.

2) Use the presentation mode

If you open your IDEA people see tiny code, your irrelevant database connections and a terminal at the bottom, you are doing it oh so wrong.
A lot of people are not aware that this exists, but with CTRL+SHIFT+A you can open the context menu and search for “presentation mode”. After activating it, you will get a big screen with all that matters: 5-7 lines of code. If you need to switch to your project view / terminal or git windows, use hotkeys (see the last point of this list).

3) Set up your project skeleton

Should be common sense but I have seen it to often to not make it a point here. Please set up a basic project skeleton that has everything you need and walk through it a couple of times before you run it in a live talk. If you spend any amount of time fixing your build, your talk is dead.

4) Please use live templates

Nobody wants to spend their time watching you type out some random boiler plate code.
Ask yourself before your talk: What points do I want to bring to the audience? What is the essential concept that I want to talk about and make sure everybody that leaves the room has a better understanding of after my talk? After that, create live templates that are structured around the concept. You are probably already familiar with live templates, when you type out “psvm” and hit enter, you get a main method.

You can add custom made live templates that should type out everything except the 2-3 lines of code that are absolutely relevant to the concept you want to talk about.

5) Get proficient at using hotkeys

Again, nobody wants to see you click around slowly with your mouse to get to the code you want. Toggle between your files using the Project view (Alt +F1 + 1) or the Switcher (CTRL+TAB) . Use the Terminal Window with Alt + 9. If you forget a shortcut use the context menu as a backup (CTRL + SHIFT + A). There are many more useful shortcuts and you should make a point of avoiding your mouse while giving a talk. As a rule of thumb: If no developer comes to you after your talk and asks you “Which shortcut/hotkey did you use to do that?” you didn’t show off enough. While it’s just a sideffect, it doesn’t hurt to show your peers that you are competent with the tools that you use everyday. There exist a lot of good plugins that you can use that prevent you from using your mouse or show you the corresponding shortcut if you have to use it. Make it a habit.

Conclusion

Tech talks are a great way to learn, especially if you are the speaker. So even If I have witnessed some suboptimal execution in the past, i’m very grateful that people stood on the stage and presented something that was relevant to them. So if you are not giving talks already, use the tips in this post and make it goal to give at least one talk every 6 months.
I know I know, it’s annoying and stressful, and after all, who cares anyway? What should you even talk about? I have been there and I agree, it can feel like a lot of stress and work. But it keeps you on your feet and grows your skills. Giving a talk will force you to better understand a topic because there is at least some social pressure to not talk complete bullshit to your peers 🙂