What are you working on? What’s something interesting you’ve just learned? We want to hear from you. Yes, you! You don’t have to give a long talk or run a workshop to share your knowledge and help other people learn something new. A 5 minute lightning talk will do!
Here’s a handy template to Show Your Work to friends, family, and some XYZ. :)
1: Elevator Pitch
Say why this is interesting, in one sentence.
What’s the takeaway for people listening? What problem does it solve, or what thing can they learn?
If you can’t say it in one sentence, stop and think for a moment. Are you trying to cover too much? Just cover one thing, or one piece of a big thing, in some detail. Are you not sure what to say? Tell us about how it saved you time, made something easier, or was something new to you.
One way of think about it in terms of size is: would you expect to find this as an answer to a question you have, maybe on Stack Overflow?
2: Short demo
Show us this thing in action.
You don’t have to do live coding: that can be quite nerve-wracking, and things can sometimes go a bit wrong (just like in day-to-day life!). Show us:
- A demo of the finished thing. Host it on the web somewhere that other people can access.
- The source code. You might want to add comments to your code as reminders for yourself and for us to read later.
Have a look at how a Front-end style guide like Twitter’s Bootstrap shows their work: explanation, example, code sample.
3: Credit where it’s due
Tell us how and where you found out about this.
One of the best things about our industry is the amount and awesomeness of the resources available. Did you find out about this thing on Smashing Mag, or CSS Tricks? On Twitter from Anna Debenham or Sara Soueidan? Let us know so we can find more cool stuff too.
Get in touch!
Ready to lightning talk? Let us know!
Our turn for credit where it’s due: the name of this and the push to get it going (again) came from reading Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work. :)