Last Tuesday I gave my first talk for a Meetup ever, It was called: What your tests are telling you and it was focused on sharing the knowledge I have acquired by looking numerous resources about testing and how improve my development, through talks, screencasts and any info that I could find. Summarizing that as I have made with some of this talks in this blog and present the main concepts and knowledge to the people at the ruby Meetup here in Santiago, Chile.

Here I leave the slides of my talk, with special credits to Zach Holman ‘cause I copied the slide design from him:

So after all that, I gonna share with you some lessons about my first talk:

  • Direct your talk to expose the best realistic scenarios possible, within that point designed examples of Live Coding are way better to show code in the slides.

  • This style of design for slides was very successful, in any case I want a personal slide design taking certain elements of holman’s and other’s style and adding a more personal touch to the design.

  • Repeat people’s questions before answer, It helps to the people is asking you know you did understand the question and make all present people participant of the question

  • Try to make the code look the biggest possible, to much text in code, it has to be seen from the last seat of the audience.

  • None of the previous practices of the talk came out the same, but in any case practicing the talk before giving it (in my case recording it with screenflow), helped me to know what animations I could add to the slides to add more emphasis on certain points during my presentation.

  • Be aware of the presentation setup, it means don’t make wide-screen slides if your projector doesn’t support wide-screen.

  • Always leave the content within a little room in the borders of the slide.

Anyway, I’m not a experienced presenter, as I said it was my first talk like this. In college I made quite a few presentations and I feel a little confident about this topic so I shared with you my learning at this first experience, hoping to improve with my next talk.