I’ve given lots of talks before, on lots of different topics over the years. From internal after lunch tech talks at work, to flying half way around the world and speaking in front of hundreds of people, and I’ve always enjoyed doing it. I have to admit though most of the time I’m talking about something that I am a Subject Matter Expert in, like this year in July when I gave a talk in Seattle about an SQL-like language that I designed and implemented. I still get a little nervous before each talk but I think that’s probably a good thing because it keeps me from getting complacent and “phoning it in”.

I’ve also been lucky enough to attend quite a few tech events over the years and see other people talk, but never more lucky than when I got to go to NDC Sydney this year. Truly the premiere developer event in Australia, it was an excellent conference where I met a ton of really great people, and left inspired in many ways. I swore to myself that in the next 12 months I would give a talk somewhere. It didn’t have to be big, but it was time to confront the first time nerves and get myself out there.

Things got a little more nerve wracking a few weeks ago when I attended the Melbourne Alt.Net meetup, as I regularly do, to watch my friend and co-worker give a talk on Azure Functions, and found out that the second speaker of the night had pulled out. Thinking of my 12 month goal I volunteered to give a talk that I had just finished preparing that day, in order to give as an internal talk in a few weeks. The reason for the extra nerves was not the impromptu nature of things, I was pretty confident in the slides I’d prepared, but in the topic at hand being “Benchmarking and Performance”.

Being a general technology session my biggest fear was simply the fact that I am far from an expert on the topic, but instead had originally intended just to get people thinking at work and maybe doing their own research. The idea that someone in the audience could ask me a complete curve ball question or undermine or prove wrong some of the info that I’d been saying, was never far from my mind. Fortunately the talk went well, I got good feedback, and even a few people taking photos of the slides and asking about accessing the code afterwards.

If you want to see the talk its available on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8zhGaT6vv8

The slides from the talk are here: https://www.slideshare.net/DavidWengier/performance-and-benchmarking-79247400

Code for the benchmarks used is here: https://github.com/davidwengier/Benchmark

Hopefully this is the first of many talks, and indeed probably not the last time I give this particular talk either. I’ve just finished the slides for my next tech talk at work, “Lowering in C#”, so who knows maybe I’ll turn up at a meetup near you soon :)