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Start presentations on the second slide
Aka "in media res"
This post explains why to start your presentation on the second slide.I stole this technique from Lawrence Block's outstanding Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, a book about writing fiction. It's like our adventure story where we're not interested in the color of the hero's hair, at least not until he's about to become a croc-snack.For example, consider a presentation on optimizing a virtual machine based on just-in-time compilation (hi @kma). Shockingly, applying this information in the usual way, by squeezing hot spots, often results in slower overall performance, while seemingly-benign changes can offer significant improvement.Applying the chapter swap technique, slide 1 would show a performance profile with a hotspot, a code change that would seem to offer improvement, and data demonstrating that not only didn't the optimization work, it made the system slower.
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