My talk at Cleanweb Ignite

I know this sounds rich coming someone who's running a website named after themselves and generally enjoys public speaking, but I find the whole prospect self-publicity incredibly uncomfortable normally, and I generally don't link to talks I give.

However, I'm expecting to do more public speaking over the coming year, so I'll need to get better at it, if only for the sake of the people having to sit through any talks I do give.

My first ever lightning talk

I recently gave my first lightning talk at Ignite Cleanweb a few days ago - you have 20 slides, auto advancing every 15 seconds, giving you 5 minutes to make your point, and be interesting. James now has put the video online on Youtube, giving me a chance to a) share it with people who missed it, and b) see exactly where I need to improve.

[embed]http://youtu.be/Psv8TaMPC8w[/embed]

Looking through my fingers

As I said before, it's pretty uncomfortable to watch this, but at least it's a good place to start, right? As an learning exercise later this week, I'll try re-recording the talk using just the audio and slides like Zach Holman at github blogs about here - it sounds like a great technique to help work on your technique, as he says here:

It’s cliché, but force yourself to listen to yourself. It will utterly change your perspective. You’ll hear all of the uhhhhhs and ummmmms you didn’t notice at the time. That’s good; listening to yourself talk is designed to make you angry enough to change those habits.

I'll update it here when I'm done, but for now, enjoy.