My Talks
TL;DR
- This year I gave 2 talks. My main talk, and then my lightning talk
- Main talk could have gone better
- Lightning talk was great!
The journey to /W4 /WX: How hard could it be?
Critiques and Learnings
I am not that happy with my performance at CppCon this year if I am brutally honest. I think I have two learnings from my talk this year:
I had too much content -> This version of the talk had more than my ACCU version, and I had half an hour less time to give it. This put a lot of pressure on me as to what topics I should skim over and what ones I should remove entirely. This led to a load of last-minute chopping and changing, and therefore I kept ruining all the practice I had done and the timings I had worked out. This is a lot of things that I did wrong, but it all comes from me having too much to talk about and not much time to get it out. But I don’t know if I could have done much better. There was a lot going on at the Studio in August which didn’t leave me much time to practise and refine. And my weekends have been spent preparing for a baby arriving.
Maybe going on the first day isn’t the greatest idea -> When I submit talks I typically make a request to speak as early as possible. In the past this has put me speaking on the 2nd day. At ACCU this year I was put on the 4th day, and fun fact, I think my ACCU on Sea performance this year was pretty damn great. I was dynamic and didn’t have many fumbles. This year I felt ill-prepared and I didn’t have a feel for the conference as a result of being on the very first day. So in future, I don’t think I will make this request.
The good parts
The nice thing is that people didn’t seem to share my doubts about my performance. People seemed to like the talk or at least everyone I spoke to thought it was good. I even got a round of applause towards the end. So I guess I can’t be too hard on myself, and perhaps I will change my mind when I listen back to the recording when it comes out. We can be our own worst critics. Also, despite my issues with timings, I did finish pretty much bang on time. The talk took 58 minutes, and there were 2 minutes for the 3 questions at the end.
Much Ado about Null
My lightning talk this year was called “Much Ado about Null”. I am REALLY happy with that title. I like to add a bit of fun to my lightning talks and I thought that this was a great play on words. I feel like my lightning talk went quite well this year. I really enjoyed it. Got a laugh or 2. And it didn’t have nearly the same technical difficulties as my ACCU on Sea one had, so progress! Also by this stage I had given my main talk so I was feeling pretty relaxed up on stage and was able to just have fun with it… Again, perhaps giving my main talk later in the week would be a good idea…