Earlier this year I got the opportunity to speak at the React for girls meet up way back in March, so this is a bit of a late post. I thought it would be a good idea to blog about the experience of what it was like for me presenting after about 2 years.
Having attended the react for girls meetups for about 5 months I was surprised when they asked me if I wanted to present, having witnessed the amazing and empowering talks given by other people I definitely didn’t feel like I had the confidence or the content to present anything. After umming and ahhing about it for a while I decided to give it ago, having attended for a few months and having a bit of an idea of what the other attendees were like, everyone is really supportive and encouraging.
How I prepped for the talk
What to present about?
I had a few ideas of things thing I could present about I was just a little unsure of how strong they were as topics, and I was wondering if anyone would want to hear about any of these topics? I decided to have a chat with my manager at work and a couple of the other devs that I work with to get an idea on what they would want to hear at a meetup and to see where I could add value to the meetup. I considered the following two topics:
- How I learnt react — tips/tricks and advice for anyone learning the language now
- How we use react within the company I work for to build an inhouse content creation tool.
I decided to go for ‘How I learnt react’ because I was able to give more of a personal opinion on the subject and hopefully give something back to new and junior devs who are learning react and to any line managers who could pick for tips for supporting their juniors. I also felt like as it was from my personal perspective there was less margin for error on my part which helped to take the pressure off presenting a bit. I also thought this would be a good chance for me to be able to reflect on what I had learned and how I had learned it.
What content do I present about
Now that I had picked what I wanted to write about, I now needed to think about what I wanted to talk about and how I could refine my content. I had a look at past work I had done and thought about sites, tools, and techniques I had used when I was learning and started by documenting that out and making a collection of all the different types of content. I kind of ended up with just loads of different things which I was struggling to organise or think of a way to present all of that stuff. The first thing I did was group the content, into some of the following categories:
- The tools
- The techniques
- What worked well together
- What didn’t work for me
I then just created a generic timeline of those events in the order that it happened to show the learning curve and I thought this was how I wanted to present. But this just seemed too long and boring and I felt like as someone listening it would be hard to take anything in from that kind of presentation. So now I had some content and it was more about how I was going to present that information.
Building the presentation
How to structure the presentation
I just put all the content into the presentation to see how much content I had and how many slides it might equate to. There ended up being a lot of slides, so I knew it had to be cut down. I thought this is probably a good thing as I would rather be cutting things down and know I have content if I ever needed to make the presentation longer. So I put all that content to one side for future use. As I love design this also gave me a chance to tap back into that a little bit when designing the presentation even though I didn’t have much time to design it, I think given the time and resource I had I was happy with the output.
The order of events
I really wanted the presentation to have some structure and narrative. To help me do this I wanted to focus on a few things and then build the presentation around that. Ultimately I wanted a beginning, middle, and end, After I had categorised the content I grouped them into 5 tips and tools which I thought were useful and helped me. This became the base of my presentation:
- Beginning — what the presentation is about and who I am
- Middle — What the tools and tips are
- End — The conclusion of the tools and tip and some of the things that didn’t work.
Once I had this in place it was all about refining and getting the presentation to flow correctly and moving bits around and cutting things out where needed.
Practice
It had been such a long time since I had presented anything and the idea of practicing I was finding nervous, but it was the only way to run through the presentation, to see if it was too long and if it all flowed. Once I had been through it once I felt a lot better I timed myself to see how long it took even though I kept messing up the same parts the practice allowed me to refine that and make sure I could recover or change the bits I was slipping up on.
I decided to print out the presentation notes with the slides so I had everything together and highlighted a few keywords so if I needed to I could just glance over at the notes and see the highlighted keyword to prompt me. I also found it helped me to know if I needed the notes they were there as I didn’t plan on using them during the presentation they were just with me to one side.
The presentation!
Then it came to presentation day! I was definitely nervous, I was one of 2 presenters and I was the second one up. I did find it was a little hard to concentrate on the presentation happening before mine because I spent quite a bit of time going over my own presentation in my head. Luckily when it came to presenting I had my notes with me at one side and I didn’t need to refer to them, but I’m still happy I had them as I feel like they helped to keep me calm as if I ever needed them I knew they were there. I did need to improvise a little bit during the presentation where I couldn’t 100% remember what I wanted to say. But I think I got all my points across in the end, and I managed to keep within the time without rushing, and even managed a few questions at the end too.
Reflection
On reflection I know it sounds a little overkill but I would make sure that you have maybe 2 versions of your presentations and double-check with the place that you are presenting that they support whatever style of presentation your choosing to do. That way if one doesn’t go according to plan then you have a backup to fall on. I am glad I got a lot of practice in and I learned its okay to improvise mid-presentation if it works and suits what you're talking about. It's also nice to know I have some backup content if I ever wanted to create a longer presentation about the same thing. More than anything else I am glad I gave the presentation and tried to rebuild my presentation and softer skills.
