Thunder Talks

Towards the end of the course the focus shifts towards more self-directed learning. This is an excellent time for you to take stock of your skills and work on specific tools before beginning your final project.

The core skills this practice targets are:

• Understanding your personal learning
• Researching new tools and technologies
• Teaching yourself new technologies
• Doing live code demos
• Explaining and teaching technologies to others
• Building a presentation on a technical topic

Requirements

Your thunder talk should:

• include a presentation with slides
• clearly introduce the topic
• talk everyone through the technology
• include a demo and optionally some live coding
• be between 10 - 15 minutes long
• leave time for questions

Topics

Your facilitators can recommend some additional topics, but here are a few you might consider:

• Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails
• Python and/or the Flask web micro-framework
• Clojure, ClojureScript, Haskell, Elixer, Elm or other functional programming languages/environments
• Data visualisation with D3.js
• Bitcoin and/or blockchain technology
• MongoDB, DynamoDB or other NoSQL databases
• Machine learning (Python has heaps of libraries)
• Angular, Vue, Next.js, Gatsby

If there is another language/library/technology that has piqued your interest, just check with your teacher ahead of time. They will might be able to help you scope your talk or consider contrasting or related technologies you might include in the material you present.