My first talk
On the 21st of November I performed my first talk at a local Elixir meetup. In front of 15 entire people I gave a 14 minute talk on turning a REST endpoint into a GraphQL one. I, like most people are not fond of public speaking, yet I knew that I would have to do it one day. I knew that in order to take the next step in my career I would have to get up there and talk about something programing related.
It all started when I submitted a talk for Elixir conference in Prague 2019. My boss said that if I managed to get a gig I would get an all expenses paid trip plus a few days extra before hand. Being the extreme money saver that I am, this was a deal that I just couldn’t pass up. As I was going through the list of questions I noticed that they if I had ever spoke before. Naturally I wrote of course I had, knowing full well that I hadn’t, but I had wanted too. So when I hit send I said to myself well you better go and do one so you’re not lying. I contacted my local meetup and asked for a spot. They had one less than a week away, now this did cause me to freak out a little bit, however I was going to do the same talk that I was planning to do for Elixir Conf. I got cracking, took some code snippets, wrote some things down in keynote, got a few people to read over it, got a designer to make it all pretty (thanks Nat!) and then forgot to really practice it. As Wednesday rolled around I still hadn’t done a tonne to prepare but I was confident so why did it matter. I got up there in front of a packed audience of 15 humans, 15 entire people, what a crowd. I also decided it would be a good idea to film it so that I could watch it again to pick up on my faults.
After it was all over I wasn’t super happy with it all, I was to rushed, I don’t think I explained things clearly enough, yet I was passionate. It took me an entire week before I could watch it, but when I did I noticed that it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had thought. Sure it wasn’t anything special but in all honesty for my first time, I was happy with it. I did learn that I need to slow down, pace myself and just enjoy the moment.
I learnt a lot from my first talk and I can’t wait to do it again. Taking the experience from this one, I think I can make a really good talk with more preparation and a more refined product. I hope to do more in the future so that I can continue to practice and get better.s
If you want to check it out here’s a link to the PDF version of my slides. Here’s the link to the actual talk, the quality is pretty average but you can follow along with the slide if you like.