(with apologies to Gabriel García Márquez) It’s weird posting to a mostly tech blog at the moment. The world is on fire, but life goes on, yet I’ve felt utterly paralysed and unable to write anything here. It feels strange and somehow wrong to write about tech stuff, which lets face it, is not that important in the grand scheme of things, when so much other stuff is going on. Yet here we are, blogging.

Last week I spoke at devrelcon London 2019, which was an interesting and fun experience. Firstly, I’d never heard of “devrel” until a few months ago, and secondly, it’s been a while since I’ve spoken or even attended a conference outside of the cosy little Open Source GIS community. For those short of time, my talk was on “Inspiring and empowering users and techies to become great writers- and why that’s important” and you can find it on GitHub for the live version, and the pdf with speaker notes.

It’s a long time since I used any kind of powerpoint-ish presentation building software (2016, I think). My software of choice these days is RevealJS (https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js/) with the occasional foray into using Big (https://github.com/tmcw/big). The premise is simple in both cases- write your presentation out in markdown or html and let javascript and css do the work to create the slide deck. This approach appeals greatly because there’s no need to plan the slides in advance, you can write them as you go, in a text editor.