Speed talk: ten slides in ten minutes
Today I was one of five who gave a talk (“Regression Therapy: Contentful Testing”) at work. We’ve been a bit under quota for internal general interest talks lately, so well done Andy for getting the ball rolling again by challenging us with a particular format: each presentation has ten slides, and they are advanced once per minute. This is fun; and the constrained duration gives great value to those attending (five talks for the price of one) and ought to mean the presenters don’t work as hard on preparation too.
Didn’t work out that way for me re preparation, though. I haven’t presented anything in ages, so there was much re-establishing familiarity with tools, and also I found the area of my talk was much too big for the allotted time and so took a lot of careful trimming and selection of succinct phrasings in order to squeeze it in - enough that I had to give the talk on auto-pilot, mostly reading from my scripted notes rather than thinking about what I was saying. (Until slide nine, where the ink from the printer had run out, the notes disappeared, and I was back in the land of conscious thought again. Probably a drop in quality at that point, I suspect.)
So having been absent from it, I can’t judge whether or not the presentation went well - but I’m very happy with the content of the subject, and I think it’ll turn into a really good proper blog posting, which will appear soon depending on how much time I have this evening.
