Referencing Concepts from Presentations

I've been delivering shorter presentations of late.  To keep things compact, I've been experimenting with just saying "I'm assuming you're familiar with these things.  If not, there are resources to help you with them."

For audiences that do know the things called out as assumptions, this has worked really well.  What hasn't worked so well is when the audience doesn't really have a good understanding of a body of knowledge that I reference rather than cover.

In retrospect, this is obvious but I certainly failed to predict it.

I'm grappling with a number of possible solutions.  I'll probably think of more later but here is what I can think of now:

• Keep materials on hand that address assumed knowledge and adapt a talk to the audience's needs.
• Do a better job of determining an audience's needs in advance and screen out ones that don't have the prerequisites.
• Do a better job of determining an audience's needs in advance and pre-adapt a talk before showing up at the venue, setting expectations appropriately in the process.

I don't know where I'm going with this but any suggestions would be welcome.

Test-Driven Architecture Article Published

The article my friend, Mike Brown, and I wrote has been published.  The topic is how to apply test-driven development to architecture.  You can find it here.

Another Article Submitted

I've submitted a third article about architecture to InformIT.  This will probably be my last one for a while.  I want to go back to focusing on the database stuff.  This most recent article has a moderately interesting story.

It started out as a position statement: Encapsulation is the most important thing in architecture.  Encapsulation is already the most important thing in any software development effort, so that ended up coming off a little pompous.

I then rewrote it as something that addressed the root motivation which underlies encapsulation: longevity.  That article ended up being interesting but it didn't talk enough about encapsulation, which was the original point of the original article.

I settled on the working title "Five Tips to Maximize Encapsulation in Your Architecture" and I have received word that it will be published on February 20^th, 2014.

I'll post a link when it is published.