Elevator Pitch
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.
Description
How can a speaker quickly generate a version of a talk, to fit in a given time length, have various options chosen for parts that vary between versions, and so on? Genaver to the rescue!
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 various parameters, and even content constructed from variables. For example, assuming you have actually created 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.
This 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.
Notes
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.)