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Done Spoked at DevWeek

So I made it through my talk at DevWeek which might sound a little odd but it took a whole bottle of cough syrup to do it. Not having been sick for most of the winter my body decided a day before DevWeek to go into shut down. I spent Tuesday in bed with very little voice. Thankfully the head colds hold on my vocal chords relented this morning and I think I managed to project as best I could.

So initial thoughts of how it went? I honestly think I'm getting better at this presenting thing so that must be a good thing, unless I was TERRIBLE before. The 2 main annoyances that have been raised thus far have been

1. Too Short

I did my usual "talk really fast and finish earlier than planned" thing I sometimes do. But there was plenty of discussion afterwards which I tought was interesting. FWIW when I present this to myself it takes longer. My internal monologue must be slower than the way I speak. Apologies to anyone that felt it was "too short".

2. Not enough Visual Studio

I opted to play it safe end embed code into my slides rather than code live - I didn't go unnoticed and I had a few comments that "moar codez" would have been good. Totally agree.

Other Stuff

I opted to change my slide deck between submitting them for print and presenting. I did it out of desire to devlier a better, more structured, talk (my first set being quite short as I was going for a "free-form" type of presentation). Probably not the most professional approach to do this but at least I can say my heart was in the right place :) Here are offending articles BTW

Code that was presented is available, as always, in/on my Github Repo. Thanks to all who attended and any other feedback you have throw it my way so I can get better at this talking malarky.

Also thanks to the folks at DevWeek for the opportunity - hopefully you'll have me back at some point.

Published in Random on March 27, 2012