On Wednesday last week, I gave an invited talk on rr to a group of interested students and faculty at Rose-Hulman. The slides I used are available, though I doubt they make a lot of sense without the talk itself to go with them. Things I was pleased with:

• I didn’t overrun my time limit, which was pretty satisfying.  I would have liked to have an hour (40 minutes talk/20 minutes for questions or overrun), but the slot was for a standard class period of 50 minutes.  I also wanted to leave some time for questions at the end, of which there were a few. Despite the talk being scheduled for the last class period of the day, it was well-attended.
• The slides worked well  My slides are inspired by Lawrence Lessig’s style of presenting, which I also used for my lightning talk in Orlando.  It forces you to think about what you’re putting on each slide and make each slide count.  (I realize I didn’t use this for my Gecko onboarding presentation; I’m not sure if the Lessig method would work for things like that.  Maybe at the next onboarding…)
• The level of sophistication was just about right, and I think the story approach to creating rr helped guide people through the presentation.  At least, it didn’t look as though many people were nodding off or completely confused, despite rr being a complex systems-heavy program.

Most of the above I credit to practicing the talk repeatedly.  I forget where I heard it, but a rule of thumb I use for presentations is 10 hours of prep time minimum (!) for every 1 hour of talk time.  The prep time always winds up helping: improving the material, refining the presentation, and boosting my confidence giving the presentation.  Despite all that practice, opportunities for improvement remain:

• The talk could have used any amount of introduction on “here’s how debuggers work”.  This is kind of old hat to me, but I realized after the fact that to many students (perhaps even some faculty), blithely asserting that rr can start and stop threads at will, for instance, might seem mysterious.  A slide or two on the differences between how rr record works vs. how rr replay works and interacts with GDB would have been clarifying as well.
• The above is an instance where a diagram or two might have been helpful.  I dislike putting diagrams in my talks because I dislike the thought of spending all that time to find a decent, simple app for drawing things, actually drawing them, and then exporting a non-awful version into a presentation.  It’s just a hurdle that I have to clear once, though, so I should just get over it.
• Checkpointing and the actual mechanisms by which rr can run forwards or backwards in your program got short shrift and should have been explained in a little more detail.  (Diagrams again…)  Perhaps not surprisingly, the checkpointing material got added later during the talk prep and therefore didn’t get practiced as much.
• The demo received very little practice (I’m sensing a theme here) and while it was able to show off a few of rr‘s capabilities, it wasn’t very polished or impressive.  Part of that is due to rr mysteriously deciding to cease working on my virtual machine, but part of that was just my own laziness and assuming things would work out just fine at the actual talk.  Always practice!

https://blog.mozilla.org/nfroyd/2016/04/18/rr-talk-post-mortem/