On presenting
In high school I was well-known for public speaking. I took a speech class my sophomore year in which we did nothing but present speeches. We held three contests that year, and I took first place in all three contests. That was a dozen or so years ago, though, and I haven't spoken in front of anyone for at least a decade.
As a member of Hashrocket, I've continually been espousing the view that, as leaders in our field, we should be constantly presenting. How can anyone in the field take us seriously if we don't show up in force at conferences, have well-attended talks, and share as much knowledge as possible? Well, this last weekend I had the opportunity to eat my own words and speak at Jax Code Camp, a mostly .Net conference that is looking for some diversity. My co-worker, Rein Henrichs, did me a solid and stepped in for my missing scheduled pair.
In so doing I was able to re-live some rookie mistakes in presenting. Luckily, I also remembered a few skills that saved my ass.
First lesson: keep a local copy of your slides. I didn't have a lot of slides, but the purpose of them was to keep the audience looking at something other than me and to provide the occasional comic relief. I got to the conference and was able to view my Google Docs slides just fine; it was only after I had to switch rooms due to projector issues that I realized my new location didn't have internet access, thus leaving me slide-less in front of a large group of strangers.
My saving grace in this situation? I had created a card with important talking points for each slide I had created. I created a short hand in high school that allowed me to keep key sentence fragments in my head and remember the surrounding sentences easily. With 10 minutes of slides suddenly gone, those cards were the only thing that saved me.
Second lesson: you're going to panic anyway. I spent somewhere between 12 and 16 hours preparing for 20 minutes of talking and 30 minutes of live coding. What did that preparation ultimately net me? 20 minutes of panicking at the beginning of the talk. My hands shook, my voice was querulous, and my eyes darted around frantically without meeting anyone's eyes.
My saving grace in this situation? My cards, again. So long as I was able to focus on putting one word in front of another, I was somehow able to keep from running out of the room screaming. I also asked the group to laugh at me right away, which may or may not have helped settle me down.
Third lesson: bring water! Two very kind souls gave me water during my talk; without them things would have been even rougher (even though I did manage to choke on said water halfway through the talk). The more nervous you get and the more you need to talk, the more crucial water becomes.
The real takeaway from this weekend's code camp wasn't that it was a series of failures; rather it was that despite a series of failures, a success was achieved. Rein Henrichs and I presented the topic together. We ran over the alotted time. We engrossed many people; our talk was standing room only. We extended the Hashrocket brand. We probably convinced some people to use git in their daily development, and we may have even convinced a couple to check out Ruby on Rails.
Now that my decade-long presenting cherry has been broken, look for much more from me.
As a member of Hashrocket, I've continually been espousing the view that, as leaders in our field, we should be constantly presenting. How can anyone in the field take us seriously if we don't show up in force at conferences, have well-attended talks, and share as much knowledge as possible? Well, this last weekend I had the opportunity to eat my own words and speak at Jax Code Camp, a mostly .Net conference that is looking for some diversity. My co-worker, Rein Henrichs, did me a solid and stepped in for my missing scheduled pair.
In so doing I was able to re-live some rookie mistakes in presenting. Luckily, I also remembered a few skills that saved my ass.
First lesson: keep a local copy of your slides. I didn't have a lot of slides, but the purpose of them was to keep the audience looking at something other than me and to provide the occasional comic relief. I got to the conference and was able to view my Google Docs slides just fine; it was only after I had to switch rooms due to projector issues that I realized my new location didn't have internet access, thus leaving me slide-less in front of a large group of strangers.
My saving grace in this situation? I had created a card with important talking points for each slide I had created. I created a short hand in high school that allowed me to keep key sentence fragments in my head and remember the surrounding sentences easily. With 10 minutes of slides suddenly gone, those cards were the only thing that saved me.
Second lesson: you're going to panic anyway. I spent somewhere between 12 and 16 hours preparing for 20 minutes of talking and 30 minutes of live coding. What did that preparation ultimately net me? 20 minutes of panicking at the beginning of the talk. My hands shook, my voice was querulous, and my eyes darted around frantically without meeting anyone's eyes.
My saving grace in this situation? My cards, again. So long as I was able to focus on putting one word in front of another, I was somehow able to keep from running out of the room screaming. I also asked the group to laugh at me right away, which may or may not have helped settle me down.
Third lesson: bring water! Two very kind souls gave me water during my talk; without them things would have been even rougher (even though I did manage to choke on said water halfway through the talk). The more nervous you get and the more you need to talk, the more crucial water becomes.
The real takeaway from this weekend's code camp wasn't that it was a series of failures; rather it was that despite a series of failures, a success was achieved. Rein Henrichs and I presented the topic together. We ran over the alotted time. We engrossed many people; our talk was standing room only. We extended the Hashrocket brand. We probably convinced some people to use git in their daily development, and we may have even convinced a couple to check out Ruby on Rails.
Now that my decade-long presenting cherry has been broken, look for much more from me.