Hi HN. If you get some value out of these slides, great! But please, do me a favor: don't try too hard to construct a narrative from a stack of slides which:
a) represent about 15% of the actual semantic content of the presentation; and
b) are shaped by the consideration that there's a limit to how much code you can put on a slide and have it still be readable.
Thank you for the note. There is a large difference between slides used in a presentation and slides intended to be read like a book. With the former, it is pretty useless to have the slides out of context. With the latter, there is no need for the author to speak. Fortunately, someone posted a video to the presentation, a better link than the initial submission's (http://confreaks.net/videos/614-cascadiaruby2011-confident-c...).
Footnote to (a): except for the slides which are intended to be unreadable because they are about the shape of the code rather than the content. An effect that works very well across a room but which is rather lost when viewing the slides on the web and without narration.
There have been a few online slide type presentations on HN recently and I usually find them frustrating because even when the subject is interesting (which is the case most of the time), the slides make you feel like there is so much information missing.
Although you say that there is a lot of content missing, I thought your slides conveyed a lot of useful information and actually made me feel like I got what your presentation was about. Well done!
a) represent about 15% of the actual semantic content of the presentation; and
b) are shaped by the consideration that there's a limit to how much code you can put on a slide and have it still be readable.
A lot of this material has been covered in more detail on my blog (http://avdi.org/devblog) For instance, I wrote a whole article about Maybe, NullObject, and the limits of the ability to make objects falsy here: http://avdi.org/devblog/2011/05/30/null-objects-and-falsines...