I know I don't often talk about work, but I need a few ideas. Help me out!
So, at work I managed to start this thing we're calling "group exercise." The team lead and I gave a joint presentation on program optimization last summer after we got back from OSCON 05 that seemed to go over well. We got some good feedback from the team about the content of the presentation itself, as well as the prospect of other ones.
It fizzled out a bit after that.
I finally took it upon myself to start this thing back up last December and, in January, I gave a presentation on unit testing with JUnit in Eclipse and Python's unittest module. Also got a lot of good feedback from that. I got some warm fuzzies when some of our team stopped by my desk later that day to ask about how to write test code for their particular projects. I sent out an email later that week asking for volunteers for the next few group exercises. We got one volunteer and another was beaten into submission/agreement.
The next scheduled date for a group exercise is this coming Thursday. And just today, after almost having to corner the fellow who was going to be demonstrating Rational Robot to the team, I find out (for various reasons that I won't go into) that he will be unable make his presentation this week.
So now I'm stuck. I don't want to cancel this week's presentation unless I absolutely have to, otherwise it will be harder to keep the momentum moving forward for this thing. Plenty of people get lots out of this and it's a good opportunity to get other team members who tend to stay back in the shadows up and talking in front of the group.
I was planning on doing a presentation on regular expressions next month. I could try and throw that together over the next few days, but both the lead and I agree that, with the little experience our team has with them and as important as they are, I need to spend more time getting that ready.
Originally, when I sent out the request for volunteers, I included a list of example topics, including things like functional programming/languages, perl, web development, any number of security topics (we've got another upcoming presentation on buffer overflows), dependency injection, and so on.
Basically, I'm hoping I can get some help coming up with ideas for a presentation I can throw together in a few hours over the next couple nights. Pointers to existing presentations I could borrow would be very much appreciated. I just don't know if I'll have the time to put together something to do justice to the topics I am currently considering (regular expressions or functional programming).
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This is pretty obvious, and hopefully your team member already know this, but there's always the idea of talking about documenting one's code. Not just commenting, but writing code that is self-documenting. Tell them that likely someone else down the road will have to work with code that they wrote. And if they do something like int x = myArray[1 + 11 + 2]; with no explanation, that person may hunt them down and break their legs.