I’m a presentation junkie

Presentation is like a drug. First time you see someone doing it you think “that guy will ruin his life”. Then, when you look carefully they seems to really enjoy it. And one day someone offer you to do one yourself. The first time you don’t know what to expect. You start talking in front of all those people. The time seems to stop but it runs, and it runs fast. Soon, someone at the back start showing you his watch. No, it’s not a new watch, he’s here to remind you to wrap up because they want to have enough time for the draw.

After that session you start thinking of what else you can present next time because you liked that feeling. You want to feel it again. That’s what happened to me some time ago.

I gave my first talk at 12 years old. I was too young back then to appreciate it like I do today. It was around 1983. I was giving a presentation on Logo. You know that small arrow in the middle of the screen to which you can give some instruction follow. That was a great language to start programming because you have an immediate feedback of what you tell it to do. Debugging was easy. If it looks great you succeeded if not, try harder. Now with all those new game with astonishing graphics that old logo isn’t that much attractive to young programmer to be. But Microsoft is working now on something new in that space: Kodu (formerly Bôkù).

Kodu is a game where, pretty much like Logo, you tell your character what to do. In this game the character is not a plain arrow but an animated 3D robot flying around your world. Another big difference is you don’t really tell it directly what to do. Instead you teach it some behaviours. For example you can tell if you see something red go toward it. And then you put your character and a red apple in a 3D environment and hit the play button. You character start to move toward the red apple until it get over it. You can tell your character once it get close enough. As with Logo it takes time to master all the commands you can use but it is as rewarding to see it in action. This game is planed to be released somewhere this spring on XBox Live.

All that to say that it is important to have a passion about something. Now I have the chance to combine two thing that make me feel good, software development and spreading my knowledge of it.

Stay tuned for more.

• http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/
• http://on10.net/blogs/larry/CES-2009-Watch-Kodu-in-Action/
• http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2009/0107-kodu.htm
• http://on10.net/blogs/larry/CES-2009-Watch-Kodu-in-Action/
• http://www.splegends.com/2009/01/halo-wars-demo-on-february-5-kodu-game.html