I was recently invited to talk about my Twitter Node project at last night's PDX Javascript Admirers meeting. I was really nervous about giving my first talk in several years, but I did alright. My slides are up on Heroku.

The big win of the talk, however, was Scott's showoff app for composing presentations.

Showoff is a sinatra app that builds a presentation from subdirectories of markdown files. In the past, I'd spend a lot of time trying to make Keynote presentations look pretty, or fiddling with HTML for raw slides. You know, I just don't care to do a lot of that stuff. Showoff lets me focus on the content.

One technique I really enjoyed, was showing a block of code in multiple slides and different comments. The comments 'animate', pointing at whatever it is I was talking about.

Also, the rapid Heroku deployment saved us a bit of hassle. I didn't have the right micro adapter for my laptop, so I was able to run the presentation just fine from another laptop.