This is a really important month for me, I have only one topic to speak about but it’s one of the most relevant. This month I achieved one of my goals for this year and I’m very proud of myself. But what is it? I gave my first talk!!! 🎉

I want to tell you how was going. It was a very beautiful experience. But starting from the beginning. At the end of April, some friends of the SH community asked me if I’d like to give a talk at a meetup in Florence. I was very excited because they requested me and also because it was an opportunity to achieve my goal. Obviously, my answer was yes. More or less they contact me one month before the event. The first thing to do was to decide on the topic and create a title and an abstract.

PANIC!!!

The talk was on the topic of Three.js, the library I used for a couple of years in one of my work projects. It was a lot of time that I don’t work with it. This is only to say that sometimes is not important if the topic is something that you are using or something that you are doing in your life, the important thing is you like it and you wanted to share it with other people. But let's have a look at what I did.

The first thing that I have done was to search for other talks with the same topic, then talks, in general, to understand how exactly it is. Usually, when you go to an event your focus is on the topic and less on the performance, but in this case, I wanted to understand how to do a talk, how to start, how to present myself, when to do that, how to finish the talk, how to use and create the slides (another important thing to do) in short to take some inspirations. It’s a good practice to take inspiration from people that have done it before you. It’s a start. After this research, I started thinking about a lineup to have an idea of how to define the talk, what to do, what to tell, and how to create a flow throw the arguments. Then I started to search and study in a more detailed way the little pieces of the talk. I started with the slides, from the simplest to the hardest. Some words about the slides.

I used the reveal.js library. It’s a very interesting tool to prepare presentations. There are different ways to use it, you can use the editor that they have created or you can download directly the source code and write your slides using HTML and CSS (this is the way I preferred). You can create what you want. Define the font, the colors, and the dispositions of the elements on the page. And also there are a lot of interesting features, for the transitions, for the code, for example, you can focus only on some parts of the code. If you are curious check the documentation, it’s very well done.

Back to the definition of the slides. I used the slides to begin the structure of the talk and day-by-day added information. I must say that it was very methodical and worked well. More or less when I finished defining the slides I started trying to do the talk using the slides. And on the 24 of May with other people, I participated in the Florence Meetup.

It was an amazing experience and I learned a lot from it. Generally, I promote events because it’s a way to improve your skills, learn different things, and meet new people but this time I have an extra motivation to do that. Events make you feel different, I feel different after an event in general but after this, I have a lot of new vibes. It was an adventure for me, I really like to speak in front of other people, it was not easy but the feeling was really pleasant. I’d like to thank the people that have supported me in this experience and believed in me and the people who make this opportunity possible by making a beautiful event. I’d like to do it again.

Here the slides.

I hope you enjoyed it, see ya!😎