I’ve written pretty extensively on my work with the Trello API and yesterday I got to present the code side of it at TechSmith’s internal development conference, ReCon.
Last year I presented for the first time (when the event was called DevCon) and I think I learned a lot from it that helped me this time around. I’m pretty sure there were fewer “ums” and “uhs” but it was also a shorter presentation with less time for that.
The shorter presentation meant I had to absolutely blow through the information I wanted to put out there, so I’m worried I didn’t give enough time for it to set in. It was supposed to be part of a larger presentation, an idea that fell apart late in the process, so I’m not sure what I could have done about that.
I think the biggest adjustment was the most important one. In my presentation last year, my code slides weren’t very legible. This time I made sure to focus on that, so there’s less code on each slide and the text is larger. I couldn’t find a better way to get syntax-highlighted, properly-spaced code on to a Powerpoint slide than with screenshots, though, which seems stupid.
Unfortunately, I made one of the same mistakes as last year, not checking the audio beforehand. I used a mic that was piped into the room speakers and recorded off an omni-directional mic that picked up everything in the room. This makes the recording sound like I was in a car wash.
I enjoyed it significantly more than my presentation last year, though, and hope I have as good of a topic to speak on next year.
I referenced “Jenny’s presentation” and she’s posted it. It covers a lot of the context I left out of mine.
