tim: TMI: Submitted a talk proposal to Open Source Bridge

Tim Chevalier (

tim) wrote,
@ 2013-02-16 05:35 pm UTC

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TMI: Submitted a talk proposal to Open Source Bridge

I've submitted a proposal to the Open Source Bridge conference to give a tutorial talk on Rust. I can still edit the proposal between now and March 2, so I'd welcome any comments or suggestions about it!

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puzzlement
2013-02-18 02:56 am UTC (link)

So that you aren't shouting into the void: this seems like a solid proposal to me. The context (what Rust is), prerequisite knowledge, and outcomes are pretty clear! One weak suggestion is to rearrange it a bit in terms of "you" rather than "I". I suspect this is a matter of personal taste, but I probably slightly prefer the "you will learn how to" "you will see", etc style, even if it does have the slightly weird effect of writing the presenter out of the presentation.

Have you been to OSBridge before? I'm wondering because LCA has a strong preference for tutorials that involve the attendees with laptops out, doing things themselves, but I think we're unusual in that respect. However, if you haven't been to OSBridge double-check that they're into this more demo style of tute. (And now you know what to change to pitch this to LCA.)

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tim
2013-02-18 07:19 pm UTC (link)

Thanks for the comments! I'll try to figure out what it would look like with second-person and see if I prefer that :-)

I haven't been to OS Bridge before, no. Originally I was planning to do a tutorial that involved the attendees with laptops out and doing things; then I realized that while that would probably be more useful, it would take a whole day in order to be useful at all, in my opinion. (It takes more than an hour and a half on some people's machines just to build Rust, and I don't feel good about expecting people to build it ahead of time, given that some people will run into build problems.) I looked at the other "cooking" track proposals and none of them seem to explicitly say that the tutorial will be hands-on, so I think I'm okay. Since I know I don't want to do the other kind of tutorial, I'm ok with it getting rejected if the organizers do turn out to prefer that kind :-)

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puzzlement
2013-02-18 07:39 pm UTC (link)

I think your model seems reasonable, and 90+ minutes of building it is obviously not going to teach anyone anything, unless Rust has some kind of miraculous tutorial session during its build :)

Given LCA's model, they would likely insist on one of the following:
- you provide tested VMs with Rust pre-built for people to boot (which in theory should mean building it against less targets)
- you provide compiled versions for them to install
- you bring a box that people SSH into and all use Rust on that (and you bring a second person to sit as root and kill people's rogue processes, LCA isn't DEFCON, but someone would try and find out if you had thought of that — cunning, attendees, you are so unpredictable!)

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tim
2013-02-18 07:41 pm UTC (link)

Those ideas are good to keep in mind, either for LCA or something else. For a conference in June, any of those options would be too much work for just me, but it's possible I might co-present something with others in the future. (And we will probably have binary downloads at some point in the future, so option 2 could potentially become easy.)

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brainwane
2013-02-18 08:26 pm UTC (link)

I've been to OSB three times. I don't think I've ever attended one of the longform tutorials, though, although I always mean to.

Take a look at previous years' tutorials for better guidance on what the organizers like to see, especially regarding the lecture-to-exercise balance.

I agree with puzzlement; this proposal seems solid to me. You answered my "why should people learn this?" and "what will they get out of it?" questions clearly.

I think you can even edit the proposal up until March 9th, in case you have any blazing crashes of insight in that final week.

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