Reflections on speaking at UnifiedDiff

Yesterday evening I went along and spoke at the UnifiedDiff meetup in Cardiff, having offered previously to do a presentation providing an introduction to Drupal.

I'm an experienced Drupal Developer, but not an experienced public speaker (although I have done several user training sessions and Drupal demonstrations for clients previously), and I think that some of the nerves that I had beforehand were apparent during the presentation, and being the first speaker for the evening probably didn't help, although I did get a nice tweet mid-way through.

Initially, after aiming for a 20-minute presentation plus Q&A, I think I wrapped up the presentation in around 14 minutes, although I did about 6 minutes of answering questions afterwards including the apparently mandatory "Why use Drupal compared to WordPress or Joomla?" question, some Drupal 8 and Symfony questions, as well as an interesting question about the White House development project after I'd listed it within a list of example sites. Next time, I think that some more detailed presenter notes are needed. Typically, as soon as it sat back in my seat, the majority of things that I'd managed to remember beforehand all came flooding back to me and I thought "I should have said that whilst I was up speaking".

Overall, considering my inexperience at speaking to this type of audience, I was fairly happy with my presentation, although I'm sure that I'll change my mind once I've watched the video of it on the UnifiedDiff website. Regardless, I think that it was a great experience and I enjoyed doing it, and I'd like to thank the organisers of UnifiedDiff for having me speak at their meetup. It was great to have a more relaxed conversation with some people after the other speakers had been up, and having introduced Drupal I would be more than happy to come back and do a more in-depth presentation if there is an interest for me to do so.