Post a Comment On: Steinn (Stan) Jónsson's Tech Talk

Today I had the interesting challenge of trying to explain various Java buzzwords to people with very little technical knowledge.  Basically, we wanted our talent managers (recruiters) at Quick Solutions to gain a high level understanding of some of the Java technologies they recruit people for.

In prepping for this presentation I put on my "simplification hat" and tried to think of the essence of some of the more popular Java technologies.  I wanted to leave the talent managers with a simple visual picture in their minds, that represented the benefits of each technology.  Then I followed each of those visuals up with a basic architecture diagram that explained how the technology fits into a typical application.  I also gave them sample questions and answers for each technology, all focused on the high-level benefits of each technology (which problems the technology is meant to solve).

At the beginning I also went over some of the reasons I love being a consultant, and how to use those to attract talent.  I basically walked through the bullet-points in this blog post.

The general feedback I got was that they were able to follow along and they found the information very helpful.  I suspect though I may have lost a few of them near the end, when I got onto design patterns :)

Below are some of the more visual slides from my presentation.  The full slide deck is available on Slideshare.

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What do you think?  Did I pick the right visuals?  Could I have made it even simpler?