This was a really sweet (in the heartwarming sense) writeup, and not at all what I expected it would be. Thank you for sharing it. Also: congrats on your new job, and I’m glad that you’re doing better since the mental health stuff mentioned.
You did all the right things, it sounds like, and leaned on relationships and life experience to manage the anxiety and prepare yourself to give a solid talk. I don’t know too much about Blazor or the ecosystem around it; I have some familiarity with .NET Core but more on the C# and SQL Server side, but that didn’t seem to be the point of the post so much
Just to add to this:
In my opinion, staring at slides is boring: if someone wants to read a bunch of text to learn something, a book or a web page is a better option than slides. I would rely on my charming looks and personality to teach and entertain my attendees.
It’s absolutely true that slides shouldn’t be read from verbatim – and a lot of developers don’t seem to realize this, but it makes for a very tedious presentation.
In general text on slides shouldn’t contain complete sentences unless they are very short. The bullets should just be a few words that remind the speaker of items to talk about. Slides should also contain images: that can be source code, screenshots, diagrams, gifs, memes, whatever. It gives the audience something to look at and some visual cues to anchor concepts
But either way, slides are great – they keep talks focused and help you to hit all the intended points. It’s just the best practices around their use are pretty non-obvious, so a lot of people leverage them poorly
Anyway, thank you for sharing your experience – genuinely enjoyed reading it
This was a really sweet (in the heartwarming sense) writeup, and not at all what I expected it would be. Thank you for sharing it. Also: congrats on your new job, and I’m glad that you’re doing better since the mental health stuff mentioned.
You did all the right things, it sounds like, and leaned on relationships and life experience to manage the anxiety and prepare yourself to give a solid talk. I don’t know too much about Blazor or the ecosystem around it; I have some familiarity with .NET Core but more on the C# and SQL Server side, but that didn’t seem to be the point of the post so much
Just to add to this:
It’s absolutely true that slides shouldn’t be read from verbatim – and a lot of developers don’t seem to realize this, but it makes for a very tedious presentation.
In general text on slides shouldn’t contain complete sentences unless they are very short. The bullets should just be a few words that remind the speaker of items to talk about. Slides should also contain images: that can be source code, screenshots, diagrams, gifs, memes, whatever. It gives the audience something to look at and some visual cues to anchor concepts
But either way, slides are great – they keep talks focused and help you to hit all the intended points. It’s just the best practices around their use are pretty non-obvious, so a lot of people leverage them poorly
Anyway, thank you for sharing your experience – genuinely enjoyed reading it