Project Fletcher Closing
Project Fletcher is coming to a close…
I’m on the train commuting down to Project Presentation Day.
And I have just been reminded of an significant risk I’ve been running - I’m incredibly dependent upon access to the Internet to give my presentations. It’s not just something like developing a presentation in Google Slides or Slides.com and never downloading an offline copy. My presentations are live. They are run from a local web server (on the laptop). Although I keep trying to ensure all javascript libraries are served locally, I’m not catching everything. In a more perfect world, I would/should have a completely static copy in some format or another as a backup or failsafe.
Things seem to work… more or less… eventually. But it sometimes requires reloading, kicking it, waiting. I CAN reload the presentation now on the train with no internet access. Not quite what I’d want while under a strict time constraint. Next, I need to make a note to check into something else. I’ve now got half a dozen slides or more with iframes pulling other pages. Somehow, for some reason, these seem to be falling out of cache. Sigh…
The trouble with these projects is that you are SUPPOSED to stop your exploration, your analysis, etc., and then have time focused just on creation and refining the presentation. But most of us keep at it. Sometimes, you’re really close to finishing something and once you’ve got it then that opens up a floodgate of further analysis or insight… sometimes invalidating or overtuning previous ideas or observations you’d baked into the presentation. It’s a very weird thing.
Nonetheless, this is a one of the most key benefits of this bootcamp. We’re learning time management and prioritization skills relative to projects overall. We’re being forced to turning things around in an iterative fashion where we can present things at various stages along the way. This is invaluable.