What I am doing this week

• Continuing to complete my Appeals database App at work (This will be ongoing until completion)
• Software Engineering
• New opportunities

Appeals Database

Although it kills me to take another week from this project, it was all hands-on deck this week trying to prep our users for the Office 365 migration. Also, my proposal meeting was pushed back a week and won't know if this project will come to fruition until then.

Presentation Medic

Thursday's class was not spent as a team, but rather spent for personal development. One of Doc's pals who is a presentation ninja lead an instructional class on how to be a better presenter. Rick Pollack is the presentation medic. He didn't focus on cool PowerPoint tips and tricks because anyone with a brain can find those out on their own. Instead he offered tips on how to really capture your audience's attention with some simple ideas.

In medic fashion he had 3 steps to assess what is going on with your presentation. First you need to examine the audience and observe what they are looking for from your presentation. It is really a presentation for them and less of a presentation about you. Once you have that figured out it is easy to diagnose the situation. You need to take care in your diagnosis and give them the sweet and easy to digest answer. They do not need to know everything about your diagnosis just whatever is enough to support your claims. In the prescription phase, you are really knocking out your client with your big idea in a nice tabular form that is easy to swallow. If your client can get your big idea in a tweet size text you have done a good job.

Another set of ideas was the three cons'. Connection, Context, and Contrast. Connection is about building a rapport with the audience. Getting them to engage and care about the subject you are presenting. The second is giving your audience some context. Not everyone is going to be as technically savvy as you, but if you can explain some very complex ideas in plain english you will be seen as a genius. The last con was contrast. This part talks about your sales pitch. You contrast what your customer's situation is without your prescription and show how their situation would be better under it.

One of the other big ideas with the presentation is the Call to Action. It gives the client something to do after your presentation to help them start down the path for your big idea. You can either put the deck online for them to review or have some sort of worksheet or handout that will give your clients a better idea on how to follow up.

I liked the presentation because it gave a strong process to making effective presentations. It is not about slide quantity or that you have a complete data dump of everything technical, but something custom tailored to what your audience wants. I have heard a similar process with other

New job

On Tuesday, out of the blue, I looked on a popular site that has Golang jobs and saw one that was out of Cambridge. The parent company is Light House Security which is a part of Light House Computer Services. Sent them a resume because I was interested on working as a Go developer. To my surprise the Technical Director answered me pretty quickly and we had a phone interview that evening. I thought the interview went well and they mentioned that she would pass my resume on to the other developers to see if I am a good fit. It wasn't until Thursday that I heard back that the other developers declined to follow up on me because of my lack of professional experience with Golang. It was fine, they were right, just probably they should update their job posting to mention that tidbit. Instead on the what you need to have for the job posting, they just put a 4-year degree in computer science. I think I just need to work on some sort of portfolio of Golang work I have done or contributed to. Maybe start posting my data structure source code and start working on some open source projects? I will give it a try.

I will continue this blog in two weeks after spring break. I have to read Don't make me think and get started on my other independant study I haven't started yet.