Recently Sapient’s Annual XT Summit concluded with some star presenters and talks. I being only 4 months old in the company and straight out of college, was reluctant at first to give a proposal for the talk. But my manager Vidhya, immediately pumped me up to propose, as soon as I told her that I was thinking of giving a talk at the Summit. First I started preparing way before the timeline, reading Meteor Guide and forums and what not. Following are the take aways that I took away from the process of preparing as well as the talk itself:

  1. The best way to learn something new is such that, eventually you’d be able to teach it to someone with impeccable ease. I was very hooked with Meteor, with what it provided and had constantly kept myself updated with all the news coming through and the Meteor night videos. But I never had read and rummaged it very deeply. In the demo for the talk I did nothing but took the todo example and showed the implications of the insecure and the autopublish package and how you can log into meteor mongo console and insert documents there. Basic stuff, because well, my talk’s name was Introduction To Meteor Framework My next move is to build something big with Meteor + React.

  2. It is very important to be able to interact with the audience constantly. And it’s also important to get a check of who your audience really is (do they know about the topic you are about to talk about, the dependencies on which your chosen topic depends, and so on and so forth).

  3. Intonations and Inflections in the voice are very important. My talk felt like I was giving an old school boring college lecture.

  4. Body Language should be straight, solid and confident. Mine was not, I was shit nervous and jim-jammed.

  5. It’s always good to practice scenarios for different time-limit given (this wouldn’t happen in big conferences, since the time slots would be very precise). My talk along with many others’ were cut short from 20 to 15 minutes, and I panicked and just left the talk in the middle.

But it was my first talk and I’m proud and Vidhya pushed me to do this. I learnt heck of a lot. Thanks a lot Vidhya!