The Fifth and Final Pecha Kucha Night

Wednesday night of the last week meant it was time to gear up for ThoughtWorks University XVIII's final Pecha Kuchas. These presentations have been the highlight of the trip for me and I can't believe we went through them so fast. As is to be expected at this point (sorry, TWU XIX), we had another phenomenal round of speakers.

A record 33% of tonight's speakers mentioned me. The topics we covered tonight weren't always given away by their titles (or first slides).

1. Humour by Rohit
2. The Family by Nitin
3. What Have We Learned From Our Mistakes? by Sanjiv
4. Be A Career Super-Hero by Sumeet
5. Canadian Winter Demystified by Felix
6. Mr. Bean by Kiran
7. Homebrewing by Julie
8. The Truth About Tigers by Chirdeep
9. Breathing by Derek [Video]

I was able to capture all of Sumeet's Super-Heros presentation on video. With his permission, it is reproduced here.

Note Sanjiv is from the last TWU batch. He was one of the organizers for the TWU Amazing Race

Challenge bonus points available for those who can guess the three which mentioned me (email submissions OK)

Thought, Ghosts, and Round 4

Another week down and another phenomenal round of Pecha Kucha completed. We had topics ranging from thought-provoking to outright hilarious. No videos this time, but we've got proof of a certain bearded fellow enjoying himself.

IMG_1526 from sumeet.moghe on Flickr

Keeping up with tradition, Sumeet has uploaded the slides below.

1. Dabbawalas of Mumbai by Sudeep
2. Biometric Technology by Vikram
3. Small Reflections of a Great House by Hardik
4. Philosophy of AI by Prateek
5. The Defect of Thought by Yang Kai
6. Our Space Time by Che Kai
7. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star by Elian
8. How Ol Charlie attacked Intelligent Design with Occam's Razor by Ananth
9. What Are You? by Mahadev, dance-off expert

It's almost impossible to pick just one quote to share, but I think I have to go with one from Mahadev.

"What are you? Some guys get offended if you ask this question. Others don't...and those guys are ghosts."

Fun Fact When two souls go for the same body, they have a merge conflict.

A "Comfortable" Round Three of Pecha Kucha

Wednesday flew by as I spent the day pairing with a trainer for the first time. For those interested in slightly more detail, we worked on implementing flash scope in our web application. It's basically a nice way to handle things like error messages from forms. I also created my first ever Java Annotation.

Pair programming example from a2gemma on Flickr.

As we came to night, it was time for another round of Pecha Kucha. These presentations just keep getting more and more fun. We had a full docket tonight of 10 speakers. A few even mentioned this blog!

1. The Laws of Attraction by Rashmi
2. Soul Theory by Shweta
3. History of Hacking by Navneet
4. Life Lessons from World of Warcraft by Sherry
5. ThoughtWorks' Leadership Team
6. TDD Applied to First Timers by Atreyee
7. A Brief History of Nursery Rhymes by Namrita
8. The Yellow Book by JK
9. The World of Advertising [Video] by Sneha
10. More than Words by Richard

For information on the title of this post, you'll have to check out "More than Words", which Richard asked me to record. Always ready for an opportunity to use my iPhone^®, we now have video. I think it's fair to say this blog and trip would be far less interesting to hear about with this little wonder device.

Free as in Freedom: Funniest Pecha Kucha Talk Ever

Tonight was the second night of Pecha Kucha presentations for ThoughtWorks University XVIII. We had nine more wonderful speakers covering an extremely diverse set of topics (links point to slides):

1. Smart Dust
2. The Chinese Zodiac
3. A Trip to Japan
4. Facts About Google
5. Web Designing
6. Tour of Australia
7. Wild Australia - How safe are you?
8. Subliminal Messages
9. What do you really see?

The incredible Sumeet Moghe was kind enough to mention my presentation from last week in his latest blog post -- Free as in Freedom: Funniest Pecha Kucha Talk Ever. He also generously tweeted and edited my slides into the presentation video.

How to get a 100 hits on your blog from Sumeet Moghe on Vimeo.

aside ThoughtWorks University has been an unbelievable experience. It feels like I've grown more in the past 2.5 weeks than the previous 5 years. The strength of our diversity shows itself every single day, and events like the Pecha Kucha are part of what sets this environment apart from any other. The magic here cannot be overstated.

Pecha Kucha: How To Get 100 Hits On Your Blog

Pecha kucha (Wikipedia) is a simple presentation format designed to make presentations rapid and concise. The style is 20x20, meaning the presenter presents 20 slides for 20 seconds each. The slides move forward on an automatic timer. It's more challenging than it sounds at first.

Tonight was ThoughtWorks University XVIII's first of five pecha kucha nights. We'll be doing nine presentations per night, one night a week, for the remainder of the university. I signed up for the first week and was more than a little nervous to find I not only was going last, but following the amazing Sumeet Moghe.

My time quickly came and I promptly headed to the front of the room to give my presentation -- How To Get 100 Hits On Your Blog. I handed my phone off to Richard on the way up and captured the entire affair in HD*. I think it went well, but I'm absolutely open to feedback.

Slides

The slides of my colleagues are also available on slideshare. We had a wide variety of presentations; covering China, Chinese cuisine, time, the Kennedy Space Center, mobile communication and Disney World.

Note The video will be available soon.
Due to multiple YouTube upload failures, please enjoy the video below hosted on Vimeo (also available in high definition).

Pecha Kucha from Steve Hill on Vimeo.