Over the past year, I’ve been giving a lot of tech talks. These were deeply fulfilling experiences, but they all had one thing in common: hours spent building slide decks. I’m a subject matter expert who knows my material inside and out, yet I still found myself spending more time fiddling with slide formatting than actually honing my content. My volunteer hours were limited, and most of that precious time was getting swallowed up by tweaking diagrams, updating stats, adjusting layouts, and reworking the flow for each unique audience. It was rewarding work, but it was also exhausting and a bit frustrating.
Then one night, it hit me: Why the heck am I still doing all of this manually? If ever there was a task begging to be automated, it was slide creation. That was my big “aha!” moment. Suddenly I wasn’t dreading the next volunteer talk’s prep. I was too busy sketching out how to make the whole slide process smarter. What if I could use AI to draft slides, shape the structure, suggest visuals, and adjust the tone, all from just a short prompt? The more I thought about it, the more excited I got. So I dove in and started building it. I ended up calling it AutoDeck.
What started as a midnight frustration quickly turned into something I rely on now. AutoDeck isn’t just a side project, it’s personal. Even though it’s still a scrappy prototype (I have to run a bunch of manual steps behind the scenes), it’s already giving me back hours of my life. I get to focus on what I love - sharing ideas instead of fighting with formatting. It’s not quite ready for anyone else to use just yet. Right now I’m the only user, and I’m tinkering with it in my spare time to get it ready for prime time. But I’m really excited to eventually share it with others.