Hi, I'm Elio and welcome to the session about how you can improve your presentation skills by scripting your live coding demos to perfection. We've all been to sessions where the speaker had to present their slides and then moving over to their IDE to show some code and to start writing and then things go wrong. For instance, if I'm already going to my IDE and having too many windows open, it creates distraction for my audience in order to see, hey, to which is he going to move. So probably I click on this one and then, oh no, accidentally I did it wrong. It needs to be my code editor. And then in my code editor, I need to ask the question, hey, is my font all right? Is it big enough? And start typing and starting to write mistakes. And these can all distract you, but also your audience.
So whenever you're going to do a live coding or presentation in general, you need to make sure that there's not too many distractions, like the notifications have to be turned off. Close down all your applications, only the ones that you need. Keep them open. Tabs. Don't use too many tabs. And context switching is really a big hassle for you to stay in the flow, but also for your audience, because you're going to lose track to which application they have to focus on.
One of those things, whenever you're going to do a coding session, it comes with preparation. And the first thing to prepare for is whenever you show codes, it should be best done with a light in. We already know that, but still, I see people not using it. So try to use a light team and set already your fonts to a bigger font size. What you can also do is change the cursor style. By default, it's a very tiny line in your editor. And it's better to use a block, because the block is more visual and it's easier to spot. And you can also do the expanding animation instead of the blinking. You can change your color. And then the last thing is hover panels. If you're going to show code and you move over to some variable, it can happen that there's a hover panel. That's also a distraction, but also for the audience, it's like, why is it there? And for you, it's like, hey, go away. I don't need you. You can turn these off. And these are very useful settings whenever you're going to do a presentation to just set them up front. So going back to my code, this is how my code looks like. And most probably, you don't see my cursor, because it's a very thin line.
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