Intro

After giving my first lightning talk, in fact my first ever public talk, at .NET Oxford at the end of last year I wasn’t sure how quickly I would rush into it again. Not because I didn’t enjoy it but because of time and what is going on in the world at the moment. After a virtual pub session after another .NET Oxford where I started talking about the Just Eat HttpClient Interception library I was convinced to do another lightning talk on this nuget package.

Preparation

Writing the code for this talk to work through the scenarios was quite fun. The library api is relatively clean and easy to start working on. The documentation is clear on the basics and having been using it for a reasonable amount of time I had a strong grasp on the fundamentals. After thinking about the presentation flow for a while I had a good idea what I was going to talk about. A high level overview of what problems does the library solve and how to solve them was about as much as the time slot would allow.

Slide Construction

I don’t use PowerPoint very often. I’m not a “power user” and every time I go to do something I have to search for it. I also get frustrated at times as, like when I write CSS, it never works out how I visualise something should look like. PowerPoint, like any application, gets easier with practice and usage. There are tips, tricks and shortcut keys which can aid with putting together a presentation. In a similar way it has parallels to a development IDE! After fighting with PowerPoint for a bit I did manage to get some slides to a point I was happy with though so that was good.

Reflections

I really enjoyed this talk. Not only was I a lot less nervous about it than before but it just felt like it flowed a bit better. Now in all honesty that’s probably down to being less nervous. I think the expectation I had on myself wasn’t as rigid either. I could just keep going with the talking and adjusted the information depth of an area depending on the time progression. 15 mins sounds really long when being told to do so but when you actually start talking it’s not that long at all. Since the last lightning talk I had also done some demos of various things at work to various audiences so that also helped with confidence.

And finally the video

Conclusion

This talk was fun. I had some great feedback from the audience as well as the library contributors which made me feel better that I’d not missed the point. There is always that “imposter syndrome” moment when you think “will anyone care?” or “why would people listen to me?” but feedback like this really helps with that.

Will I do another lightning talk? Sure. As long as I find something I want to do. Will I do a longer session slot one day, maybe!

I hope you found the video interesting. Any feedback, good or bad, please contact me on Twitter @WestDiscGolf.