Last night I gave a talk, “Open Source 3D Printing: The Printers, Toolchain, & Things”, at the Greater Toronto Area Linux User Group (GTALUG). In addition to being the longest talk I’ve given thus far, at 90 minutes, I think it was the best. I feel more relaxed and in control with every talk I give.
For reference, I’m making the slideshow available.
I was rather nervous about giving my 1 hour SoOnCon talk, 3D Printing Awesome Things, especially after how my NYC Maker Faire talk went. Apparently I’d learned a lot from my NYC Maker Faire talk, and it went awesome! You can see my slide show.
The talk was mostly about interesting tricks I’d seen or come up with for printing awesome things, with examples of applications. I passed around dozens of examples. I actually only spoke for about forty minutes, leaving the last 20 for other people to share things that they’d seen or done themselves.
Many interesting things came out of the ensuing conversation. The ones that come to mind are:
After a talk, a number of people told me that it was good, which was really comforting. I felt like it went well, but hearing people who sat through it agree was great! I was particularly touched by the person who told me that they hadn’t been using their spaces printer because they didn’t like the texture of printed objects, but would now that they’d seen the different post-processing techniques I use.
I feel like the success of this talk was partly due to it being a much easier and less technical topic than the Maker Faire one, me being a little bit less sleep deprived, but also simply that I’ve got better at giving talks having. Having physical examples to pass around was an awesome strategy, as well.
In addition to running a booth at Maker Faire this weekend, I gave a talk on programmatic CAD and its future.
My only public speaking experience prior to this was doing was doing workshops at hacklab and presentations to my classmates in high school and while this was a non-trivial amount of practice (in grade 10, I ended up teaching two semesters of the physics course I was taking in the form of seminars every class because the teacher didn’t know anything) it was all small scale (at max 15 people), highly interactive and mostly improvised on the spot. In other words, nothing at all like speaking at NYC Maker Faire.
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