On Thursday, I presented to around 30 developers attending the July Bristol Skillswap at Bristol’s Watershed.
It was my first-ever public speaking gig (if you ignore some sales presentations), and I’m delighted by how well it went. The talk was a ten-minute PowerPoint introduction and then 45 minutes of live coding – this was pretty taxing – finishing off with a 30-minute Q+A.
The PowerPoint bit was a breeze, and the coding went OK because I’d run through the whole thing several times to prepare. I did wobble when I got an error, but it turned out that I’d saved a file to the wrong place.
I got some great feedback from Ed Mitchell, the guy running the show, and according to him, the audience was paying close attention to everything I was doing, so at least I didn’t bore them.
I also got to meet a few underscore regulars, including Rick Hurst, Andy Gale, Dan Hilton and Oliver Humpage (who also works at the Watershed as a techie) and the evening was finished off by getting pretty messy with Ed, Toby Roal and Dan Dixon who all seem like good eggs.
For those of you interested, here are the following things I used in my presentation:
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