2025-07-14 18:05:01
We just finished the WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2025 in Berlin, and I am still recovering from the event. It was a fantastic experience, and I am grateful to everyone who attended and made it a success. As the main moderator of the main stage, I had the pleasure of introducing many amazing speakers and topics. I also had a great experience with the stage crew, who did a tremendous job getting all speakers set up, mic-ed up and ready to rock. However, we also had quite a few hiccups and live demos not working and the reason is always the same: presenters assume that there will be a fast and stable connection at events, which is never the case.
I’ve written about this in more detail in the Developer Advocacy Handbook more than a decade ago, but things have not changed much. Sure, events spend an amazing amount of money and effort on connectivity, but with tons of people at the event all connected, official streaming and a whole bunch of influencers being online all the time, any network can have its outages. So here is a piece of advice that helped me tons during my career as a presenter, trainer and moderator: do not rely on connectivity but make sure your presentation material works offline.
Now, almost every presentation tool these days is cloud-first. Google Slides, PowerPoint, millions of “best powerpoint alternatives”, all are available in the browser and on-line. Which is great as it allows for collaboration without having to sync a file of several dozen megabytes. The main slides are OK to depend on a connection, but it gets tricky when you embed video, fonts, demo code and images not as part of the presentation but as an online dependency.
Videos embedded in your slides that are hosted on, for example, YouTube are a terrible idea because:
So, for the sake of the mental state of stage crew, moderators and all that support you as a presenter: make your slides work offline. If you present from the stage machine, have it on a memory stick and prepare fonts you use to install. If you present on your own computer, have all you need on your own device and turn off any syncing to Clouds (Apple Cloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox…) before you start presenting.
Personally, I use PowerPoint and download videos to embed using yt-dlp or Downie.
Public speaking is stressful as it is, don’t make it harder on yourself by relying on tech that may not be available.
2025-07-08 15:07:32
Hi there, I am currently slightly freaking out as this week is the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin and I am moderating the main stage with 23 talks in two days and still have to write the closing keynote. Officially the event starts on Thursday, but if you are already in Berlin tomorrow, I put together a grand “Day Zero” agenda on the “Airstream” stage outside the building (the big silver RV).
2025-06-19 11:25:21
I often have to create QR codes and whilst the built-in generator in browsers is good enough, I sometimes want to customise the look with a logo in the centre. There are quite a few QR generators out there, but they come with lots of advertising, interstitials and other annoyances. So here are two generators I found and use that don’t have any of that:
If you really want to geek out, you can also learn how to read QR codes without a computer .
2025-06-19 02:28:14
I wasn’t a fan of smart glasses. Mostly because of the way they were advertised as a tool for influencers, people who constantly want to stream or those who need to always have the newest and coolest in terms of gadgets. I also see them as a privacy and security worry – there were quite a few instances of people using them to doxx others in real time and I like to see people holding up their phone to film things rather than having to spot a small light on someone’s shades.
It could also be that I just couldn’t be bothered with them as I have bad eyesight and need glasses since I was 12 or so. Now I am at a stage where I need varifocals that cost a ton and the deterioration of my eyes means I can’t use contacts. And even if I could, I tried contacts once but my brain really doesn’t like my fingers near my eyeballs.
Then I organised the AI and Accessbility day last week and two of my non-sighted friends, Artur Ortega and Léonie Watson both have smart glasses. Leonie even wrote about her use of smart glasses in detail and Artur has been using them for a while now. They both use them as an accessibility aid, to help them navigate the world around them and to read text that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to see.
I was surprised to see how much they liked them and how useful they found them.
They both said that the glasses have made a significant difference in their daily lives, allowing them to do things that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. For example, they can read signs and labels that they couldn’t before, or navigate unfamiliar places more easily. The main difference is that they don’t need to pick up their phones to do this and point it in the right direction, all they need to do is to look in the right direction and the glasses will do the rest.
It made me realise that smart glasses aren’t just a gimmick for influencers or a privacy concern, but can actually be a valuable tool for people with disabilities. And one that feels natural to use, and with an affordable price tag.
I still won’t buy any – for the reasons I mentioned above – but I can see how they can be a useful tool for others. And I hope that more people will see them as such, rather than just a toy for the rich and famous. It shows once again that a benefitting audience can be found in the most unexpected places, and that technology can be a force for good when used in the right way.
2025-05-26 15:46:22
There is no doubt that AI can help a lot when writing documents. There is also no doubt that it can be detrimental to both quality and the writing process if the AI-powered tool doesn’t have a user experience tailored to the task at hand.
We live in a world of AI overload, and many tools promise to take the “pain” of writing away by generating tons of text at the press of a button. If that’s what you want to have, great. If that’s what the world needs—lots of similar-sounding text advocating products in an almost sincere and clever-sounding voice—doubtful. Unless you’re a spammer, then the world of AI text generators is a wet dream come true. Hey, you can even create tons of comments with genuinely looking users that bait interaction or suggest quality that isn’t there.
When using chat systems to help me work on my writing tasks, I quickly got frustrated that there is no granular change. You can create posts with a prompt. When you tell the machine to change only a few structural things, it keeps creating totally new texts with other annoyances. And you have to wait for the whole text to change.
I’m a writer, and I love writing. I don’t feel that writing is a chore. To me, it feels like painting with letters and words. I love keeping my texts simple and to the point. I don’t want to impress with overly elaborate voice and vocabulary. And I don’t want to be “excited” and “amazed” by things all the time. Unless you put almost as much effort into writing the prompt as into writing the post, the voice of chat systems out there is a terribly excitable salesperson.
As a professional writer, I learned about the power of a good editor. When I wrote my books, I had both technical editors, making sure that what I wrote made sense, and grammar and voice editors, keeping me in check when I made mistakes or when my sentences became overly elaborate. Like this last one. Lately, I’ve started using EditGPT as a tool to aid my writing. Instead of being an AI text generator, it’s a writing and reviewing tool, which allows you to change, edit, and refine what you wrote. The interface is pretty straightforward, and if you’ve collaboratively edited in Word with reviewers in the past, it’s utterly familiar. The only difference is that there is no delay of a few days that you get with a human reviewer.
The other bit that I really like about EditGPT is that it’s keyboard-driven, and it allows me to alter parts of the text rather than recreate full texts over and over again.
So, if you also feel like writing and keeping your own voice and style but want an instant reviewer to keep you in check, why not try EditGPT , too? It represents to me what AI should be: a helper to hone your craft and challenge you to do better rather than giving you something to publish as if it’s your own work.
