[VPM] RFC: trimming my Muldis D talk for OSCON, PGDay next week

[Darren Duncan]

P.S.  I have completely rewritten my talk from the version given at the 
VLUG July 8th meeting, thanks partly to feedback I got there; the new one's 
much better.
-----

All,

I've just nearly-finished writing my first talk for an international
conference, a double-header of OSCON and PGDay, and I am now seeking your
advance feedback to make the talk better.  Especially in how to best trim
it to fit in the 45 minutes of time I have.  And within the next 2 days or
so is important; sorry for the rush.

The talk is titled "Muldis D - Portable Databases At Full Power", and it is
slated to be given twice within a few days, once on July 20th at PGDay, and
again on July 23rd at OSCON.

The purpose of this talk is to introduce my new database programming
language, Muldis D, in such a way that attendees would become interested in
it and want to learn more, such as by looking at the official spec
published on CPAN, and then ideally so they would want to try using it.

In a nutshell, Muldis D is effectively a generalization of all the dialects
of SQL out there, as well as a modernization of SQL that isn't hobbled by
ill-conceived or out-dated aspects and features.  Muldis D is intended to
serve as an intermediate language for translating any kind of SQL code from
one dialect to another, or to/from non-SQL languages, while exactly
preserving all of its semantics.  Muldis D is intended to be used as a
toolkit for building better database wrappers, persistence tools,
abstraction frameworks, migration tools, ORMs, etc, in any general purpose
language.

You can see a copy of the talk now at
http://www.muldis.com/slideshows/Muldis_D_PDAFP_200807.xul .

This is a single text file that contains all the slides, and it is designed
to run as a slideshow in a Firefox browser (click anywhere on the page to
advance next, or you can navigate using a hiding slider at the top).  If
you don't have Firefox or want to see the source, well it is plain text
with essentially no markup; you can view it in a text editor.

I would greatly appreciate it if several of you could walk through the
slideshow and give me feedback on it.  The talk and the slideshow are
essentially one and the same.

Mainly I want to know how I can best chop it down in size so it will fit,
along with audience questions, in the 45 minutes that I have to give it.

Currently from my test readings I estimate that it would take about 50-60
minutes to simply present all of it, never mind extra time taken up by
audience questions.  Also about the last 10%, introducing my reference
implementation, is still to be done, though the outline and main points for
that is included in the slides.  So this means I probably have to chop
about half of what is there now to make it fit, targeting about 30-35
minutes without questions.

So the kind of feedback I'd like includes what portions you think are the
most expendable, as well as what portions seem the best and that should be
kept.  I want to keep what will get people interested to learn more and try
it out, so your own opinions of what details were the most/least attractive
will be very helpful to me.

Also, if you can make suggestions on editing my text so it is communicating
the same ideas using fewer words, less is more, that is appreciated too.

Also, I also need to know if you think I omitted any important things; what
should I be adding?

If you are inclined, you can actually edit the file to conform how you
think it would be better, and send me your copy; I can diff it against mine
to see what you changed.

As I get feedback, I'll regularly be updating the live copy at
http://www.muldis.com/slideshows/Muldis_D_PDAFP_200807.xul so if people
regularly look back there, they don't have to worry about suggesting
changes that were already made.

Similarly, this talk is in version control at
http://utsl.gen.nz/gitweb/?p=Muldis-D so you can easily see *what* changes
I'm making to it over time, at least every few hours.  (Note that the
server may occasionally display error 500, but that should probably go away
in a few minutes or an hour when you can try again.)

While email is one main way to submit feedback, I also plan to lurk on some
semi-related IRC channels for the next few days where I can take feedback
also as discussion (I don't have my own channel yet); if this applies to
you, then you probably already hang out there, or you can ask me where.

Thank you in advance for any quick help; it is greatly appreciated.

-- Darren Duncan