Multi-Talking (no, that's not a typo) with Genaver!

Ever want to easily generate new versions of a talk, to fit in a new time length, rephrase things for a different country, and so on? Genaver to the rescue! This talk covers the need, history, workings, and usage of this useful little kluge.

Adapting a presentation for different audiences can be a daunting task. You may need to make it longer or shorter, change the language (human and/or programming), include or omit different details, and more.

This gets very cumbersome with binary files like from PowerPoint or Keynote. But with any Markdown or HTML based presentation tool, Genaver makes it much easier!

Genaver (Gen-A-Ver) is a small piece of JavaScript I wrote, to generate versions of a talk, with pieces chosen on the basis of parameters, and even content constructed from variables. For example, assuming you have actually created and properly tagged the necessary content, it can create a version with the introduction in Japanese, the code in Ruby, and fitting in 45 minutes, or with the introduction in Portuguese, the code in Elixir, and fitting in 30 minutes, just by changing parameters.

It can also be used for other purposes, such as including or excluding JavaScript libraries that soak up resources, substituting a child’s name in a letter from Santa Claus / Father Christmas, and much more.

This talk is the story of how that came to be, including finding the need, other options I explored, how I settled on this way, how it works under the hood, where to find it, and how you can use it too.

This is suitable mainly for conferences about kluges, hacks, jury-rigging, workarounds, silliness, and so forth, such as GambiConf.dev, !!Con, or SIGBOVIK. But, it could be useful for other conferences, just to show some of the fun things you can do with JavaScript.

Main Agenda: - Why I needed something like this - Other possible uses, like temporarily omitting JS libs that soak up resources, inserting a child’s name in a “letter from Santa”, etc. - How I came to this implementation - Walkthrough of the code - Demo: string equality matches (as human and programming languages), numerical order matches (as time), and variables

I have done this at one conference so far, GambiConf 2023 in São Paulo. The video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJtFPdvBcj8 – but it’s in Portuguese. :-) (I could certainly translate it to English, or even French, with a bit more lead time.)