Session

Multi-Talking (no, that's not a typo) with Genaver!

Adapting a presentation for different audiences can be a daunting task. You may need to make it longer or shorter, change the language (human and/or programming), include or omit different details, and more. This gets very cumbersome with binary files like from PowerPoint or Keynote. But with any Markdown or HTML based presentation tool, Genaver makes it much easier!

*Genaver* (Gen-A-Ver) is a small piece of JavaScript I wrote, to generate versions of a talk, with pieces chosen on the basis of parameters, and even content constructed from variables. For example, assuming you have actually created and properly tagged the necessary content, it can create a version with the introduction in Japanese, the code in Ruby, and fitting in 45 minutes, or with the introduction in Portuguese, the code in Elixir, and fitting in 30 minutes, just by changing parameters.

It can also be used for other purposes, such as including or excluding JavaScript libraries that soak up resources, substituting a child's name in a letter from Santa Claus / Father Christmas, and much more.

This talk is the story of how that came to be, including finding the need, other options I explored, how I settled on this way, how it works under the hood, where to find it, and how you can use it too.

This is suitable mainly for conferences about kluges, hacks, jury-rigging, workarounds, silliness, and so forth, such as GambiConf.dev, !!Con, or SIGBOVIK. But, it could be useful for other conferences, mainly JS-focused ones and others on creativity in general, just to show some of the fun things you can do with JavaScript. (For geeky values of "fun".) :-)

Agenda:
- Why I needed something like this
- How I came to this implementation
- Walkthrough of the code
- Demos:
* string equality filtering to choose language
* numerical order filtering to choose different explanations
* constructing content from variables to make a URL
- Where to find it, how to use it, other such practical matters
- Conclusion

I have done this at one conference so far, GambiConf 2023 in São Paulo. The video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJtFPdvBcj8 -- but it's in Portuguese. :-) (I could certainly translate it to English, or even French, with a bit more lead time.)

At suitable conferences, this would also go well with my "From Audience to Authority: Breaking Into Conference Speaking" talk.

Dave Aronson

T. Rex at Codosaurus, LLC

Fairfax, Virginia, United States

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