What I learnt by presenting at SRUG
I always wanted to do a technical presentation and it finally happened on 29th March 2011 at Woking. I just think putting yourself in front of 20-30 people and to respond to their queries is a courageous task and I am quite pleased to have experienced it now. Well, it all started off with a simple email from the SRUG organiser and I dived head first. Since it was my first ever presentation, I was more inclined to pick an easy topic. I am thankful there that there is a Surrey Ruby User Group’s Uservoice page with several preferred topics and I decided to go for “Creating Gems”. You can find my presentation “Creating Gems” on github. I used showoff gem along with a simple screencast.
So, now here’s what I learnt from the whole experience. This is my personal feedback on my performance:
- Always, always and always carry all the equipment you might need on the day. For example: I did not have a Mini DV to VGA adapter to hook up with the projector which meant I had to go second.
- Check your presentation on different resolutions. Projector’s resolution can spoil the whole presentation. It works on my machine would just not cut it.
- I am still quite new to showoff gem and I should have spent more time exploring it. It’s quite amazing and you can do a ton of stuff with it but I still need to delve into it a bit more.
- Use an iPad to do your presentations. Jon (the fellow presenter on the night) was using an iPad and the whole experience was just amazing.
and now on the funny side:
There’s a twitter user called killallclients. Hilarious stories in that stream and ofcourse you know that such presentations are amazing for networking and meeting people who could offer you work in the future. I was quite disappointed by my presentation and I am working on improving it next time.