My First Conference Talk Experience

• Umbraco
• Conference talk
• Medium format
• 35mm

Earlier this year, I did something that I would never had dreamed about a year ago. I got up on stage at a conference and talked for 40 minutes. Like most first-times, it was terrible, but I’m OK with that.

So here is a quick list of things that I could do better next time.

1. I had an idea for a title, but not much of an idea for a talk. My title idea fitted with the 80’s theme of the conference. For the talk itself, I planned to talk about a 9 month project, and condense it into 40 minutes
2. I didn’t give myself enough time to write it.. I’m pretty busy at work, I rarely have enough time to work on my scheduled projects, so I would have to write this in my own time. 3 weeks of evenings should have been plenty of time, but I was tired and easily distracted. Probably the biggest culprit was Stranger Things season 2 coming out on Netflix.
3. I didn’t practice out loud. When I announced to the world that I was getting on stage, and old friend gave me some really good advice. “record yourself doing the run through, and watch yourself back”. I didn’t, because I was still writing it the night before the talk (see above)
4. 30 mins before the talk, I deleted a lot of slides. I thought my slides were waffling and I would run over, so hid a good number of them. The end result was a disjointed narrative, and at one point in my talk I actually said “I had a slide here, I think I removed it”