My first public talk about ReactXP

Update 09/18/2019 : Switched the content to Youtube Video and added a link to the slides

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Disclaimer: This post is in english but it links to external resources in french.

Early January 2019, I skipped out of my comfort zone to give a 20 mins talk + Q&A about my experience around ReactXP. This has been a truly wonderful experience because -somehow- I managed to be very relaxed.

Anyway, before I dive into the details of how I prepared, the talk- in french- is online here:

You can download the slides from here.

 

I had more than 3 months to prepare. It’s a lot of time.

Slides

I started working on the slides. And I think I made the mistake that everyone faces somehow: Too many slides, too many information. Because the talk involved work with one of my client, I shared my draft with them very early in the process.

And it has been a blessing. They said to me that the attendees should listen to me and not read the slides.  So I ended up trashing half of the slides to finish with only 13 slides.

Books

I red books on public speaking and self awareness. I posted links to them in case you’re interested:

Routines

I worked on a couple of daily/weekly routines in order to be ready the d-day:

1. Review the slides every week for 2 months before the event, allowing changes. The event manager asked me for the presentation a week before I go live,  and I send the slides right away, because I was very happy with the final result.
2. Record the talk with a timer in order to:
   • Stay in the allotted time.
   • Listen back to it to acknowledge my voice tone and volume.
   • Find the perfect balance between improvised and prepared sentences.
   • Make sure I’m telling an interesting story.

I’ve done the rehearsal 12 times, 1 time a day starting 15 days before the talk. This way I’ve put no pressure on myself a couple of days before the event.

Be honest about myself

I also took some time to talk about me, because I’ve come a long way to achieving this.

I used to be very shy and introverted when I was young. I was also terrified about being rejected because I was not perfect. I mean, this is far beyond imposter syndrome, it is shame. I’m in therapy for almost 3 years and honestly it helped a lot.

Interestingly I unintentionally  did not include this part during the rehearsals. I has been 100% improvised and it worked very well at that particular time.

Final thoughts

I hope to give some more talks in the future because I love sharing what I’ve learned for so many years in the software industry.

Stay tuned for more.