In 33 Strategies of War Robert Greene starts with the most important part - self-directed warfare. In order to achieve anything in life we have to conquer own fears first. On Monday (23th of April) I had a privilege to speak about Engineering Productivity during KraQA meetup. To be honest it wasn't easy. It's fair to say that I have conquered myself there.
Road
The story begins few years ago when I have started blogging. Things written here can be used as framework & background for future talks. It opened my eyes for public speaking opportunities. I though I was ready for theoretical point of view, I saw my testing thoughts valuable for listeners, but I was afraid of big crowd looking at me.
Then out of nowhere I noticed that KraQA(testing meetup located in Kraków) is looking for help. At first, it wasn't meant to be a speaking opportunity platform, but I just wanted to help the initiative I like. Thanks to very friendly and relaxed atmosphere on meetups I was able to get familiar with more experienced speakers. I even managed to meet with huge part of my future audience, so I wasn't speaking to strangers on Monday.
Third and probably the most important step to my public speaking was Vistula University. I managed to get hired there as a Java basics course lecturer. Groups there can be as high as 30 people, so I quickly gathered confidence in my speaking and teaching skills. At first, I was doing average job, but acting on good feedback I started gradual improvement.
Feedback from my talk
Rating myself is probably a bad idea, so I'll just copy-paste results.
Probably even with worse ratings I'd be very happy, because as I said already in first paragraph it was more about conquering personal fears.
Slides
Original slides were in polish. I translated them into English for blog readers.
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