Behind the scenes of building a React lecture

5 min readDec 26, 2018

For a long time I wanted to create a React lecture but could never find the right time and courage for that.

When I almost started I said to myself : “Who do you think you are? You are not ready yet dude..”

But Luckily , I told some people about it some spontaneous calls and meetings and some of them gave me some great tips and made me feel I can do it.

Feeling you can is not enough , but you also need your first early adopter for presenting the lecture and get valuable feedbacks.

Two months ago, Omri Bitan(a great friend and the founder of UpStream Accelerator) , approached me and asked me to do a React lecture for the 5 startups there.

Of course I said yes and from there the clock started to tick and I did not have a choice but to be efficient and just do it!

In the image, me when building the lecture

It is truly important for me that others can learn from my processes and make their life easier if they are also trying to do the same thing.

I documented most of the processes from the start,

I used the documentation in order to build a todo list

hopefully it could help others

here we go…

1. Get the courage — tell it to some experienced dudes

I spoke with Nir Kaufman and Ori Harel which did some great tech lectures before and could give me the confidence to start and feel I know how to start
answered the following questions before I chose the subject

What do I want people to take from the lecture?

What do I like the most?

What do I know and don’t know? Make sure before the lecture and don’t be shy to say it

Is this lecture a tutorial/inspiration/deep dive? — decide on one type help

2. Find some early adopters (or they will find you)

I had a plan that waited on Trello for a long time to approach some meetup groups and people

And than without a notice , Omri Bitan (the man!) asked me : “Hey Chen, can you do for us a React lecture one and a half month for now? Me: Oh of course!

When you get the opportunity, take it. This is the thing that will light the fire inside and everything will start happening just because you do not have a choice (:

3. Find some subjects for the lecture. Only subjects that you are passionate about!

Write three to five main points for lecture
Fit to the audience and context! Early stage startups? Give tips for tools to build with React faster that usual : awesome-react, NativeBase, Material-UI..find more
Choose 2 subjects from your options that you like the most
Share their outline with other people to get feedback (make sure they cover the target audience)
Choose 3–5 people and send them, see what makes them interest the most and try understanding why
After choosing one subject, make sure the objective and key point are in the beginning of the lecture (also add data about myself and my projects

4. Start building the structure and content

Collect links, stuff to read, videos and visuals
Choose only the ones that seem relevant
Make a list of them in a doc and categorised them by your outline
Create structure bullets for the lecture (they will become the slides in the end of the process)
Fill inside each bullet some relevant data and links and materials relevant for them
Choose from the links doc the relevant ones and past as part of the bullets

5. Find places where you can let the audience participate or being active

What questions can you ask the audience?
Where can you involve them in the thinking processes as part of the lecture?

For example, I did live coding with a funny emoji React website and asked them to tell me how they would build it.

6. Now everything is ready — Create the presentation!

Each slide is a bullet unless the bullet has some sub-bullets which require some more visuals. In this case, add more slides (:
Do not take to much care of the design at first, make it organised and paste some visuals, code pieces on the slide even it looks totally ugly. Just make it get a shape with some content

7. Dry runs! Yay!

Put a timer and try doing the lecture talking to yourself, even if you are not ready. It is the best way to see where you are natural and where you are stuck.
Write the timings and places you felt less comfortable and fill the gaps in your docs of the bullets and maybe add some clues in the slides (;
Choose 2–3 relevant friends and do the lecture for them (one by one or together) . It is also fine by phone or skype as long as they see it. I got my help from two frienda who are experienced programmers Amit BenDor and Omri who know the audience of the lecture and can be very helpful
Get feedback from them and write it.
Change the presentation according to their feedback
Last dry run on someone else