Damian Conway

My brief visit to Portugal just expanded a little.

In addition to the two public classes we’re running (and, yes, there are still a few seats left for either day), I’m now also going to be delivering my infamous Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Spacetimes…Made Easy! presentation, as a free seminar next Thursday night.

This talk has already melted hundreds of geek neocortexes in both London and Oslo in the past fortnight; next week it will wreak its terrible destruction on Lusitanian minds as well.

So, if you’re in Lisbon, don’t miss out on my most brain-twisting talk ever. Thursday May 3 from 7pm at Edifício Fórum Picoas. Entry is free and everyone is welcome (though you do need to register to ensure a seat).

Damian

PS: My sincere thanks to SAPO for sponsoring this event.

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, it’s been quite a few years since I last gave a public talk in Zurich. Happily, we’ve been able to remedy that on this visit.

Digicomp run a regular seminar series entitled “Open Tuesday” on the first Tuesday of each month, and I’m going to be speaking at that event on (no surprise) Tuesday May 8, from 6pm. Specifically, I’ll be giving my Fun with Dead Languages seminar.

The event is completely free, but they do need people to register so they can manage numbers correctly (just follow the “shopping cart” link on the Open Tuesday webpage)

Meanwhile, my various Perl-related classes at ETH are slowly filling, but there are still plenty of places left if you’re interested in some (entirely new) classes on Test-Driven Development, OO or API design, or optimizing your Perl development processes.

So if you’re in Zurich in early May, sign up for one (or more!) of my events. At very least, drop in to the “Open Tuesday” talk and see me do great and terrible things with ancient langauges.

Damian

So, apart from London, Oslo, and Zurich, I’m delighted to say that I’m now also going to be visiting Lisbon during my current European speaking tour…on May 3rd and 4th.

We’ll definitely be offering a public talk one evening for the local Open Source community (I’ll update when I have the details), but we’re also running a couple of public classes in Portugal for the first time in several years.

The classes are the recently updated Features of Modern Perls and the hugely popular Mastering Vim, and you can sign up for either (or both, with a discount) on the Caixa Mágica website.

I’m very much looking forward to catching up with many friends in Portugal next month. And, after what will have been nearly a full month in London and Oslo, and as lovely as those two cities are, I suspect I will secretly also be looking forward to some warm and sunny weather as well. ;-)

Damian

I have been most fortunate to have been able to visit Zurich every year since 2008, to teach classes at the ETH.

Zurich is one of my favorite cities in the world: there’s something undefinably “civilized” about it. It’s elegant, but vibrant, and yet strangely tranquil too. From the glorious lake-front to the sylvan Zurichberg, its natural beauties always draw me back. Not to mention the wonderful food.

And yet, the reason I keep returning to Zurich is not any of those undeniable attractions. It’s the people I meet and work with there. Smart, serious, witty, genuine, and generous people. Developers, academics, and scientists, who are always a pleasure to teach…and a joy to learn from as well.

This year we’re going to try something a little different in Zurich. My previous visits have always been later in the year, but in 2012 we’re experimenting with a Spring schedule with four completely new classes.

It’s taken longer than we’d hoped to arrange our venue and classes¹. So much so that there is now only just over a month until the classes begin.

So, if you’re in Zurich (or could be) in early May, and you’re looking for some entirely new classes on designing and developing in Perl, sign up now and join us next month.

What better excuse to be in Zurich in Springtime?!

Damian

¹ Previous visits during the summer break, when there is much less demand for teaching spaces, have always been much easier to organize.

When I was just starting out in my career a very wise person told me:

“The day you find a job you love, is the last day you’ll ever have to work.”

For me, that day was the day I discovered public speaking.

And for the past decade I’ve made my living doing almost nothing apart from standing in front of an audience and telling them stuff.

Of course, I still code every day…just not for pay. I’ve also done quite a bit of design over the past ten years, but again not for any direct remuneration. It’s teaching and presenting and keynoting that pays the bills and, conveniently, it’s those three activities that I enjoy above all.

So I guess it isn’t surprising that my very favorite presentation, my very favorite thing to teach…is Presentation Skills. Apart from the delicious recursiveness of it¹, I truly believe that teaching people how to be more confident, better organized, more communicative, and hence more effective in front of an audience is some of the most important work I ever do. Certainly it seems to inject more good in the world than almost anything else I spend time on².

I usually only get the chance to help people become better presenters at conferences (where I’m often asked to run a workshop for the speakers). It’s a rare treat to be able to offer the same class to a more general audience. Which is precisely what we’re doing in London in two weeks time: FlossUK is organizing a public rendition of my Presentation Aikido class.

So, if you find you’re terrified of standing in front of an audience, if you dread being asked to deliver a coherent presentation on your area of expertise (or, worse, on your area of non-expertise), or if you actually love speaking in public but simply wish you were better at it, then I’d encourage you to sign up for my class on April 16th.

Let me share my passion for presentation with you, and—more pragmatically—let me teach you all the theory and techniques and tools and even some of the tricks I use to make my presentations as entertaining and as informative as I possibly can.

Let me show you how I do what I love.
And why I love what I do.

PS: If you’re reading this because your interested in presentation skills, but you have no idea who I am, or why I might think I could teach people how to present better…well, hi there! Thanks for reading this far.

And, no, I certainly don’t expect you to take my word for it. Instead, see here and here and here and here and here and maybe even here.

Okay, so it’s true that I do have extremely compromising photos of most of those people (beating children, orphaning widows, voluntarily coding in C++, reading “Twilight” non-ironically, etc.), but I really am also quite good at what I do. And good at teaching others to do it as well.

¹When publicly speaking about public speaking I sometimes find it necessary to publicly speak about publicly speaking about public speaking. At which point I’m always tempted to speak publicly about speaking in public about publicly speaking about public speaking. At which point my head explodes.

²Not just the direct good it does for the attendees themselves, but also the greatly magnified good it does for entire audiences if even one student goes away and can subsequently deliver a tighter, more relevant, more interesting, and more entertaining presentation that doesn’t suck.