First, I was able to deliver the entire presentation in three hours, which blows my mind.
Second, I think the time spent talking about the reasoning behind why we might do certain things is every bit as important as the actual technical details.
Third, I've come to realize that there is an odd excitement/dread mix when presenting. Many people say that they are most nervous the first time they present a talk or presentation. I've decided I'm more nervous the second time I present something. The first time I may get through on beginner's luck or if I do take an arrow in the process (meaning I realize areas I messed up or could do better) that's in the moment and it's experienced, processed and put away for future reflection.
I use the term "arrow" specifically due to an old podcast where Merlin Mann represented this idea. Someone in battle feels the first arrow that hits them. It hurts, but it doesn't hurt nearly as much as the second arrow. The reason? The first arrow hits us by surprise. The second arrow we know is coming. It's the same impact but because I've been there and done that, I am often frustrated when the efforts to mitigate the issues I dealt with the first time aren't mitigated or something else I hadn't considered happens.
Much of this came down to making materials available to people in a way that was useful and timely. As I talked to a number of participants, we realized we had several similar problems:
- the materials were made available in advance but some people waited until the night before at the hotel to download them and discovered the hotel bandwidth couldn't handle it.
- the flash drive I handed off (though I did my best to make sure it was read/write on as many machines as possible) ended up as read-only on some machines. Thus it meant copying everything over to bring up the environment, which took close to a half hour for many people.
- even with all of this, I still managed to have to hear (more times than I wanted to), "sorry, my Hyper-V manager is set up by my company. I can't mount the flash drive or open the files". Ugh! On the "bright side" that was a situation that I couldn't control for or do anything about even if everything else worked flawlessly. Still, it was frustrating to have to tell so many people to buddy up with someone who could install everything.
So what did I learn taking my second arrow with this presentation?
1. The immediate install party will only ever happen if everyone in advance confirms that they are up and running well before the event. While the flash drives certainly help, they don't provide that large a time savings as compared to just having everyone set up when they walk in.
2. The "set up" and "rationale" part of my talk... since it's a workshop, what I should be doing (I think), is getting into the nuts and bolts immediately, and sharing rationale around each part of the process as we are getting into it. As it was, my introductory material took about 40 minutes to get through before we fired up the IDE and explored the framework itself. That's too long. Granted, it's there so that people can get everything installed but I think I can pace it better going forward.
3. Though the framework I offer is bare bones, I think I can comment better in the examples and should have some before and after examples that use different aspects and let people see them as a natural progression. Perhaps have three maven projects, each being a further progression from the last one.
Don't get me wrong, I had a blast giving this workshop and I hope the participants likewise enjoyed it. Still, I hope I can make it better going forward and here's hoping I'll get another chance to present it at another conference and hopefully not end up taking the third arrow ;).
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