I gave a talk at BarCampBelfast last week, which was good fun. The talk I gave was called "5 non-techie ways to be a good programmer". I wasn't sure on the audience level, so I decided to give a fairly general talk. I figured there would be a lot of web programmers and a lot of designers, so I sort of came at it from leftfield.
Here's the link - http://prezi.com/44606 (I used a funky presentation tool).
I wanted to outline the non-technical qualities I thought a good programmer should have. I didn't want to scare people away (I only had 30mins), so I kept the points quite straight-forward. I was also aware that a lot of attendees might be students, so I figured they'd be mad keen on the technical stuff, but wouldn't have heard much about the "people skills" of programming.
- Question Everything
- Take a wide berth
- Be a realist
- Measure don't guess
- Be Up front.
The 'take a wide berth' was the only funny point. I wanted to keep a joke in there about giving programmer's a wide berth. But the main point was basically "generalise don't specialise". And funny enough, that's what I was questioned about. Maybe when you start off with programming, you want to learn one tool really well, as opposed to building up your overall skillset.
The unconference was a great way to spend the day and I'll definately attend the next one in November!
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