DEV Community

How I used VS Code for my talk instead of Keynote or Powerpoint

Nicolas Carlo on November 18, 2019

This article was originally written on my personal blog. I am republishing it here for the DEV community. Last week, I spoke at Bulgaria PHP 201...

Read full post

Aaron Powell • Nov 18 '19

Nice!

I'll do a shameless plug for an extension I wrote, Profile Switcher, which can be useful to pre-configure the VS Code environment and flick to it without having to remember all the settings to tweak 😉

tommy george • Nov 19 '19

This looks very cool! Much more in depth than my meager attempt at a settings toggler! 😆

Nicolas Torres • Nov 18 '19

Also seen someone use git commits instead of live coding recording. It clearly shows the step by step diffs, and avoid live writing. Just put small diffs per commits, add incremental tags, and then checkout the target tag whenever you need to move forward. Really efficient, yet really basic.

Tamara Temple • Nov 19 '19 • Edited

this is especially great for tutorials and code-a-longs, so you help ppl get back on the same page quickly

Wai Kay • Nov 20 '19

Great! Now someone will write a PowerPoint extension for VSC to open and display PowerPoint slides on a tab. 😁

Nicolas Carlo • Nov 20 '19

😁 It's just a matter of time.

Molly Crendraven • Nov 18 '19

Awesome post!

Slightly off-topic, is your presentation online anywhere? Hexagonal Architecture sounds like something I'd be interested in.

Nicolas Carlo • Nov 19 '19

Thanks!
It was recorded but it's not yet published. I'll let you know when it is 😉

Mariano Aquino • Nov 29 '19

can you let Me know as well? or how can we check for it? i'd like to see what it looks like in action! thanks!

Nicolas Carlo • Nov 29 '19

I guess twitter.com/bgphpconf will tweet about it when recording are released.
I will come back and reply to the comment when I got the link. I'll ping you too ;-)

Mariano Aquino • Dec 6 '19

thank you very much! keep on doing this! :)

tommy george • Nov 19 '19

This is such a great walkthrough of all the thinking behind your decisions. Love it!

I have done similar things, and developed an Extension for VS Code specifically to toggle in and out of "presentation mode": marketplace.visualstudio.com/items...

It's a bit niche, but you can drop an entire custom config in those settings, and it will allow you to toggle between your current settings, and whatever you define.

The README isn't fancy, but improvements are welcome on the github link! 😆 😊

I really like the idea of "macros" for live coding, and I agree with your philosophy: It's about showing the code being written, in context, and running. Regardless of typing speed or accuracy (or lack thereof!). 👍🏽

deathshadow60 • Nov 25 '19

Funny, I just write mine with HTML and CSS... which is even more "powerful" thanks to CSS3 and new triggers like :target

Just put each slide in a div, give it a id, and href="#id" to it. Set all those sibling div to be positioned off-screen, and when they div:target slide them into view. Easy-peasy lemon-squeezy.

Amir Yunas • Nov 26 '19

I think this is an amazing extension you built. I really enjoyed the blog post as well. I was playing with the extension, and I noticed when you enter presentation mode, it preloads a set of files from your project. How do you choose the files you want to present?

Nicolas Carlo • Nov 26 '19

Thanks for giving it a try!

For the moment, it opens all the files that are located at the root of the current workspace, by convention. Folders will be ignored. That's the convention I'm using for my slides.

There is no way to configure where the slides are located yet. But that's a feature I'd consider implementing. If you want, please open an issue to detail how you'd like the extension to behave, so we can discuss 🙂