Tuesday, May 27, 2014

A hidden benefit of presenting...

A big benefit of presenting technical subjects is the surprising new tangents that open to widen your existing knowledge of a subject. When preparing demos for SharePoint or JavaScript sessions, I often find that an investigation into data or techniques to enliven an example will uncover lots of new ideas and approaches that can benefit my every day work.

As an example, recently I was preparing a session on Visualising data in SharePoint through the use of OData and client-side code, and came across the wonders of Crossfilter for analysing/processing large data sets on the client. That (and the similar library "PourOver") look to make this type of data presentation very efficient. Looking forward to doing more with them.

Have you used these libraries yourself? Any good or bad experiences to share?