From SOA buzzwords to WS-Confusion and back to Earth

Another interesting topic from Guy Kawasaki: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/by_the_numbers_.html

During our last meeting last Saturday, all of the teams were able to present their projects and put their weeks or months of hard work for public judgement. Some felt valued, some felt underrepresented, some must have thought that the public didn’t understand what their team wanted to express and did not see how hard in fact they worked. And they were right. No matter how much effort you put into a project and no matter how big, stable and sophisticated your creation is, the public only has a few minutes to learn about it and evaluate it. And it’s how you present it that matters.

I don’t claim to be a presentation guru or the mr. know-it-all. But I did have some damn good presentations in my life, I took part in a few presentation-related courses, read some theory and I used to analyze the way others present ideas and track down the common mistakes that they make.

So what I would like to present here is a list of some most relevant presentation tips that I gathered from my own experience and a variety of other sources. This is not directly SOA-related stuff, but in any business or academic environment a good presenter is priceless. And we all agreed that our presentations last Saturday were not really top notch. So here it goes (and feel free to post your tips and tricks or links in the comments).

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“Mashing it up” is nice. “Mashing it up” is cool. “Mashing it up” is the way to go.

Or not.

At least in some cases most of the buisiness use-cases .

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I really enjoyed Adomas talking about his early career on some previous lecture, how inovations (and buzzwords ) helped him and how he benefited from it. And have been thinking a lot about it and I think that makes sense. Although I have found an interesting blog post by Shahid N. Shah why tools and buzz-technologies should not be chosen to help a career. Authors says that “Just don’t choose a tool or product … because a developer wants to “learn the tool” at your customer’s expense!”. Well, that also makes sense .

Adomas mentioned and posted a link to a Guy Kawasaki’s video, where he talks about how should you start your business, what pitfalls awaits you and on what things you should focus. Presentation is quite long, but it’s worth it . Guy Kawasaki started in jewellery business and worked for Apple twice as a (chef) evangelist. He is the guy who brought the concept of evangelist to IT business. Wikipedia defines evangelist as a person who “promotes the use of a particular product or technology through talks, articles, blogging, user demonstrations, recorded demonstrations, or the creation of sample projects“. Well, the definition is clear, but personally I don’t like it. I would rather agree with Jeff Atwood who defines term evangelist as a person who shares his excitement and enthusiasm with other people in an effective way. Or to put in short, evangelist is a sales person who shows others what cool stuff their company is doing.