It was just made with slidev

Digging out your own strengths and weaknesses is a difficult thing. In Chinese-speaking societies, it’s probably hard to hear someone sincerely praise one of your skills, and I often even notice a phenomenon where people put themselves down to seem less ostentatious. I’m one of those people too, but recently I’ve been trying to change.

As for weaknesses, that goes without saying. Unless you happen to meet a benefactor or a meddlesome friend, very few people are willing to risk making you uncomfortable or even ending the friendship just to point out your flaws.

I think it is completely impossible, and utterly meaningless, to evaluate a person’s abilities or achievements accurately and objectively.

At my previous company, I once held a technical principles sharing session in order to help people from other departments better understand technical terms, mainly covering web development-related topics.

When I first started planning it, I even thought about explaining things like DNS, IP addresses, and packet mechanisms in full detail. But on second thought, that would be pretty tedious for people from other departments, and aside from satisfying tech nerds, it wouldn’t really be very effective.

The goal at the time was to give everyone the most basic understanding, so I eventually decided to avoid technical details as much as possible and instead use analogies to help the audience grasp the concepts.

The topics included HTML, the basics of the internet, servers, as well as APIs and JSON.

I spent quite a bit of time building the interactions, and in the end the presentation was deployed as a website. People could directly answer multiple-choice questions in the slides, and even write code with an embedded editor.

This wasn’t my first time holding a meeting entirely in Japanese, but it was my first time giving a presentation in Japanese to such a large group of non-developers.

Let me briefly explain the difference between developers and non-developers. In projects at my previous company, there were usually foreigners on the development team, so everyone was already used to a mixed English-Japanese communication style. But in this sharing session, most of the participants were from planning, legal, and QA, so I had to completely switch perspectives, which was a huge challenge for me.

Still, the results were better than I expected. In the feedback questionnaire, many people answered “わかりやすかった” and “聞きやすかった.” Maybe there was a bit of お世辞 in there, but filling out the questionnaire wasn’t mandatory, so I was pretty happy to receive nearly 10 pieces of similar feedback.

There were also comments I hadn’t expected before, such as:

“穏やかな話し方”

“口調が丁寧で優しかった”

My previous presentations were mainly aimed at developers, and a large portion of them were foreign. So for a sharing session attended mostly by Japanese people to receive feedback like this made me very happy. It also made me realize that this might be a strength I hadn’t paid attention to before.

That said, one developer gave me a very low rating on the feedback form. He was the team’s Tech Lead, and even when a colleague praised the slides by saying they were amazing, he directly poured cold water on it in a Slack thread, replying: “It was made with slidev.”

Because he usually gave me the impression of being a senior with deep technical expertise, and he was also one of the early developers on the project, I was surprised to get such a response.

If you dwell on this kind of reply too much, it’s easy to fall into negativity, though maybe he simply meant to say that it was made with slidev.

Still, out of so many ways to communicate, he chose a particularly bad one. For me, it was a lesson, and I hope I don’t become someone who brings negative energy to the team.

Lastly, if you’re a developer who wants to control some interactions in a presentation with code, I strongly recommend slidev by antfu. In addition to the basic features, which can be handled directly with markdown, all kinds of interactions can be developed with Vue components—it has everything you need.