My first tech talk

On 31st Jan I gave my first technical talk. The topic was Performance and Scalability. The goal was to make BMC's (org where I work) developers aware of implicit P&S requirements and expectations which Product Managers may not have captured in the User Stories.

I gave the presentation along with our architect Sudhir. We worked together for few weeks collecting the material and coming up with good examples for the presentation. This was a voluntary assignment and had to be done along with the daily work load.

The presentation was recorded and made available publicly on BMC KPoint site here. Although the recording is of poor quality, one can view the slides clearly.

Initial part was presented by Sudhir. I start at around 00:51:00 in the video. I think its not clear from the video but it was quiet apparent to the audience then that I was scared and confused as hell in the beginning. But actually it was more than that. My throat was all dry and I could barely speak. After a minute or so I thought I should just give up and ask Sudhir to continue. But I continued and I think I recovered myself after sometime.

This should not have happened. I have being teaching students for 8 year now. I have pretty good experience on stage, my voice is loud and clear, I am accustomed to use microphone. But still I was nervous. These were no students. These were employees, developers. Some having far more experience than me. And they were around 100.

But even this was not the problem. Problem was that I was not prepared thoroughly for first two slides. And when I am not thorough in what I have to say, I get distracted. I need to look into the notes for key words, there is low confidence in the voice and I become nervous. I recovered because I was ok with later slides. Some of the later slides were completely done by me. I was thorough with them.

I am glad its over but sad that I did basic mistakes that I was aware of. Lack of preparedness is big mistake in case of presentation. You have to be convinced yourself before you try to convince others. You have to completely absorb the material.

Anyways, On 31st Jan I gave my first technical talk :)