Presentation: TweetLife, The Universe, and Everything

Take another mind-altering journey to the outer limits of programming as Damian explores:

• The unlikely convenience of quantum finite state automata
• The demonic power of Maxwell's information engine
• The computational expressiveness of (un)natural languages

...blending them all into a simple self-describing massively parallel auto-visualizing superpositional proof-by-simulation system that spans six centuries of the computational arts.

Presentation: TweetUnderstanding & Using Regular Expressions

For most programmers, regular expressions are a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma shrouded in line-noise.

So most sensible programmers either don't use them at all (and are thereby forced to reinvent worse wheels...badly), or else they fall back on an "evolutionary programming" approach: find an existing regex that looks like it might do, then randomly permute its "genome" over and over again until it appears to work.

In this talk we'll go back to basics and discover that regexes mostly aren't what you think they are, mostly don't work the way you were told they did, and mostly shouldn't be created the way everyone tells you to.

More usefully, we'll also talk about what regexes really are, how they actually work, and see how normal programmers can make use of their existing software development skills to construct correct and efficient regexes...without selling their souls or losing their minds.

Training: Presentation Aikido Tweet

Presenting technical information to an audience is one of the hardest tasks any I.T. professional can face. Presenting effectively is not a natural talent for most people. Indeed, many technical presentations utterly fail in their primary objective -- to convey a complex idea or argument clearly and convincingly.

This class explains -- and demonstrates -- the key techniques that combine to produce an effective and enjoyable technical presentation.