Puppet talk

Here are the slides from a presentation on Puppet I gave at the Software Alliance Wales lightning lunch on 27th September 2013: https://speakerdeck.com/spikeheap/our-experience-with-puppet.

Aside: making simple presentations

The source for those slides is available here.

If you need to build a simple presentation I’d definitely recommend Reveal.js. There are a good number of open-source presentation engines emerging now, and it’s great to see open tools (finally) competing with Keynote/Powerpoint for simplicity. For simple presentations it blows them out of the water.

If you want something swanky or want an open-source competitor to Prezi check out http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js/#/bored. It’s amazing, but was a little too heavy for the presentation at the top of this post!

My requirements were pretty simple: the day before the lightning talk I needed to drop some code examples onto a couple of slides to demonstrate the Puppet syntax. I don’t have Keynote, LibreOffice or Powerpoint installed on my iMac. I also didn’t want to have to take my laptop to the talk.

Reveal.js was pretty much the top Google hit, and offers a very simple setup: a HTML file which you add slides to, and a bunch of supporting CSS and Javascript. The slideshow is trivial to run because it’s just a webpage. Anyone with a modern browser which goes full screen would do fine to present with.

I really enjoyed throwing the slides together because this process separates the content from the style, so you just get on with making things more interesting.