First Speaking Gig

Last week, Wednesday 20th Feb, I presented at the Brighton Web Development Meet-up. My talk was an introduction on using Selenium WeDriver, starting out with the basics, leading into introducing the page object model and finishing with an example on how to use a single suite of tests on multiple websites. The demo code and slide deck can be found on my GitHub account. The room was pretty packed with about 25-30 people and a 50/50 mix of developers/testers. I was quite pleased that I didn’t lose anyone as the demos are very C# heavy and only a handful of the attendees had .NET experience.

Previously I have presented a 15 minute lightning talk at a development show and tell evening (video here) but this was the first time I’ve presented a proper talk for an evening – it’s a shame that the presentation wasn’t recorded as it would have been good to see the difference between the two. A lot has changed over the past 8 years and I think I’ve built more confidence, in 2018 I also presented at a company offsite to 200+ people. Whilst public speaking is definitely still a scary experience, I think I’ve got the bug and will definitely do it again – either the same talk or on something new.

As a reminder to myself for future talks, always practice at least twice – the first time I seem to whiz through the slides/demos, the second time I realise I can take longer but probably over-run a bit. The third time feels like it might be the sweet spot on duration.