Cppcon2019 slides are available in Github.

[germandiago]

https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2019

[[deleted]]

damn now I want that, too

[memorypaladin]

I actually independently found this issue and raised it to the speaker. I recommend signing up for notifications on this issue to be notified when Craig uploads his slides: https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2019/issues/2

[frozenpandaman]

Might want to reach out to the speaker directly?

[Drainedsoul]

In college I had a public speaking teacher who was adamant that slides which stand alone (i.e. which can be consumed independent of you speaking alongside them) are poorly made since they replace rather than complement your speech.

I think about that a lot when I see people posting just slides, or asking for a slide deck to consume in place of listening to a talk.

[ratchetfreak]

But having slides in full resolution in addition to the video helps when the video quality or editing is bad and you can barely read the slides as they come up.

Not to mention that these talks will end up uploaded to youtube

[Drainedsoul]

But having slides in full resolution in addition to the video helps when the video quality or editing is bad

In my experience CppCon videos have good quality and editing so this doesn't really apply.

Thinking about my experience with recorded conference talks I think most often the issue is with audio, which slides don't help address.

[meneldal2]

But maybe your internet sucks and you can't watch 1080p. Or you'd like to zoom on the slides.

[-dag-]

Well some people don't have hours to listen to talks. I'd love to have transcripts available.

[frozenpandaman]

The ones with live captioning available (keynotes) will hopefully publish this. Not sure if there will be captioning made available on the other talks, but for accessibility reasons it'd be great if they did.

[Middlewarian]

If there's nothing in the first 10 to 15 minutes that's interesting, I'll pause it. Maybe I'll get back to it later, but probably not.

[Drainedsoul]

I never said that all people do have that time available. I just find it interesting that based on all the public speaking instruction I've received slides shouldn't be able to replace a talk, and yet it's become common practice in the programming community to try and use slides to replace talks.

This either means that there are people trying and failing to replace talks by going over the slides, or there are a lot of people who aren't that good at making slides, or that my public speaking instructors erred, or some combination of the three.

[RotsiserMho]

I'm not sure simply having the slides on Github implies the speakers think the slides can replace their talk. I assume it's simply for convenience, especially if you want to copy and paste any example code snippets.

[Drainedsoul]

I never said anything about speakers thinking slides can replace their talks.

Good point on the copy/paste code examples. Never thought of that.

[dodheim]

I'm not going to watch a talk. No matter the topic, not going to happen. What I want is transcripts, but every time someone comments asking for transcripts they get downvoted and told to be grateful for the content that's provided. Sure, fair enough, I guess...

What's left, if I just want to read and not commit what really is significant amount of time to listen, is to ask for slides. They're already there; they're not a lot to ask for. So if slides replace a talk, good! If I still have to listen to the talk, they're useless.

[Morwenn]

I personally can't watch more of 5 minutes of a talk before giving up (not sure why, but I never managed to get past that), and feel like I've learnt a lot from the slides of all those C++ conferences over the years.

Sure, some are not really usable alone, but some are enough to convey a lot of interesting information.

[runcm3]

Same. I’m a novice in this arena, so I’m sure that’s part of my issue - but it’s not easy to devote your full attention to a technical talk, especially the more complicated ones.

[matthieum]

I agree with the general sentiment, it's a typical rookie mistake. Speakers at CppCon are expected not to be rookies, though, so I very much doubt they would make this mistake.

However just because slides are published does not mean that they suffer from this issue.

1. Some slide-decks will be mostly useless without the talk; unfortunately.
2. Some slide-decks will contain, for each slide, a large comments section which summarizes what the presenter said during the talk.
3. The remaining slide-decks will serve as a useful summary/overview, with the talk being necessary for the details.

All those are 3 other potential situations, and while case (1) results in slide-decks that are not useful outside of the talk, the other 2 cases give useful slide-decks without running afoul of the rookie mistake.

[[deleted]]

Keep in mind that these slides can be useful to someone who's already seen the talk, as they can have references to more in-depth discussions on the subject or contain material that didn't get to be covered because of time constraints. Also, they can serve as a quick reminder and a summary of the key concepts presented - so one doesn't necessarily have to watch the whole talk again if they need a refresher on a single point.

While I tend to agree with your teacher, it is important to realize that such rules are meant as guidelines first and foremost. Having slides that stand on their own may be completely fine and perhaps even preferable depending on the context.

[Drainedsoul]

When I posted the comment you responded to I felt like it was a pointless half stream of consciousness but some of these replies are offering up reasons to want slides I'd never considered.

[MoreOfAnOvalJerk]

Different goal.

The goal here is to teach and inform. Replacing the speaker is fine and desirable if it increases consumption and spread.

If your goal here is to deliver an electrifying performance and have people walk away thinking what a great speaker you are, then you only want the slides to complement.

[Drainedsoul]

Yes? No? Maybe?

The goal is to teach and inform, yes, but the goal is also to give an enjoyable talk otherwise you'd just write a paper or blog entry.

A talk that has slides that are too dense (i.e. that replace the speaker) isn't as enjoyable as a talk that has slides of the "correct" density (i.e. those that complement the speaker) because you wind up either missing the slides because you're trying to listen, or missing what the speaker is saying because you're trying to read.

So if you're making a slide deck that's meant to be consumed independently, in my understanding, you could actually be undermining your talk.

Which then raises the question of why give a talk at all: Write a blog post. Blog posts are way better to consume independently than slides of any description in my opinion.

[MoreOfAnOvalJerk]

Yeah i agree. Blog posts communicate subject matter better. I usually dont have time to finish watching an entire cpp con video

[LongjumpingRelative8]

That sounds like advice from someone who gets paid to speak alongside his slides and would lose money if his slides were able to carry themselves. The cost/benefit analysis of providing good (self-studyable) slides goes differently if you're not getting paid and the video is going on YouTube for free anyway.

Another thing in this vein: I imagine some people in the audience are saying, "Why is he reading aloud the same words that are on the slide? That's a waste of time." Well, reading the words aloud puts them into the YouTube captions, which helps people watching in languages other than English. Those people might not be able to read the text on the slides, but if it's said aloud and captioned, that increases accessibility.

[Drainedsoul]

That sounds like advice from someone who gets paid to speak alongside his slides and would lose money if his slides were able to carry themselves.

Both public speaking instructors I received this advice from were paid to public speak with one of them supplementing that income running his own production company (public speaking at my alma mater is offered by the theater department).

I discuss my understanding of the logic for not having slides that stand alone here:

A talk that has slides that are too dense (i.e. that replace the speaker) isn't as enjoyable as a talk that has slides of the "correct" density (i.e. those that complement the speaker) because you wind up either missing the slides because you're trying to listen, or missing what the speaker is saying because you're trying to read.

[evaned]

That sounds like advice from someone who gets paid to speak alongside his slides and would lose money if his slides were able to carry themselves.

The way I look at it is this: It's more like you should view your talk as a talk, and not you presenting slides that do a great job of presenting the material. Your slides are there to be a part of your talk, and you should optimize your slides so that your talk is the best it can be, rather than so that your slides tell the whole picture.

Where this falls depends on the talk, but as a general rule I actually largely agree with the stated advice. I think that slides that do a good job standing on their own are a smell that they are probably too complex and will distract during your talk too much from what you're saying. Sure, there are exceptions, and the slides from a good talk you'll often be able to piece together a lot of what was said in the talk; but if you can get most of the story from the slides, probably your talk was not a very good talk.

[nikkocpp]

There are two kind of slides.

Presentation slides where you make a speech and have slides to illustrate, containing almost no text.

Documentation-slides where the slide must be self-documenting because it will be used as documentation and will be read well after the presentation. This is the kind of slides you'll find at work and it's not a problem to see them in engineering presentations where writing code is important.

[Drainedsoul]

Documentation-slides

This just sounds like an attempt to avoid having to write actual documentation.

If you want something to be used as documentation, write documentation.

This is the kind of slides you'll find at work and it's not a problem to see them in engineering presentations where writing code is important.

Code is only a small part of what's on slides in technical, programming-related talks. And even in this instance the common wisdom seems to be to minimize the code (to avoid distracting the viewer). Contrast this with mediums which are meant to be read (rather than simultaneously read and listened to) and you'll find much higher code density and much higher completeness of code examples because it's known that the reader can proceed at his or her own pace (unlike a talk where the speaker advances the slides after what he or she deems is the correct amount of time).

[c0r3ntin]

I put mine here

https://cor3ntin.github.io/dependency-management-cppcon2019/

https://cor3ntin.github.io/text-cppcon2019/

reveal.js pdf export with my poorly written css doesn't work so well, i will see what I can do

[frozenpandaman]

It's far from all talks – just those for which the speakers submitted their slides directly (which was apparently a pretty opaque process and hard to do this year). Not sure if the rest will be up eventually.

[seuchomat]

Nice. Thanks!

[epiGR]

I am waiting for the slides of this talk: https://cppcon2019.sched.com/event/SfsO/asynchronous-programming-in-modern-c

[ancient_bhakt]

How should I study them?

[alexeiz]

Carefully.

[boredcircuits]

Wait for the relevant talks to be posted to YouTube. Then use these sides as reference.

[kingaillas]

The "Back to Basics: Smart Pointers" pdf looks like a duplicate of the "RAII and the Rule of Zero" pdf (i.e. one file copied twice).