What does it feel like to be a speaker?

Author: Tomas Zulberti Bio: I'm Tomas Zulberti, alias tzulberti. There's not much to say more than I'm student at UBA in Computer Sciences, and nothing... Email: tzulberti@gmail.com Twitter: @tzulberti Webpage: http://tzulberti.com.ar/

For those who do not know me, my name is Tomas Zulberti and I was speaker at PyDay of Cordoba in 2011 with the same talk as in PyCon 2010: Using additional libraries.

As there was an article about my talk at the PET #2; I thought I could discuss my experience as speaker (Which is not much compared with that of others).

The first talk I gave was in Rafaela PyDay 2010 (http://www.pyday.com.ar/rafaela2010). Unlike the events in Cordoba, the talks were 40 minutes and had only one single track of talks. It was a very really bad presentation for several reasons:

• Talk blended many different topics:
  • Versioning Systems: svn, and mercurial
  • The Python IDEs: vim, pycharm and eclipse (Ninja did not exist).
  • Different consoles of python: ipython, bpython, etc.
  • How to install libraries: easy-install and pip
• I was very nervous. Although I had practiced the conversation at my home is not the same when one has come forward to speak in front of 70 people.
• As I had too many spots, I could not speak a lot about each.

When finished and questions from the audience came, I realized the talk had not been good. But I learned an important lesson:

It's easier if you focus on few topics.

This allows you to give more details of how things work. Otherwise, you just get to name features that may be relevant for your audience.

My second talk, shared with Facundo Batista, was in the event organized in radio La Tribu (http://python.org.ar/pyar/CharlasAbiertas2010) which had the title "Introduction to Python" and agreed by mail that I would show some things from the python standard library.

I investigated the documentation on modules with "simple" functionality to explain and chose the following:

• datetime: To work with dates.
• mail: Everyone knows what an email is and it seemed a good idea to show how with python one could use the service in less than 15 lines.
• zip: To compress files.
• unittest: For unit testing.

I also gave a list of some other useful modules.

And how I was this time? I was nervous again, but I liked the topics I gave. I also talked very fast (I can not remember if it was because I thought I had no time or because nerves).

As we head into what it was my third talk which was in PyDay Buenos Aires 2010 (http://www.pyday.com.ar/buenosaires2010), I decided to give the same topics proposed for PyCon Cordoba (external libraries) and use this event as a practice. I wasn't that nervous here as in previous events, but the talk was not well given. I complicated my talk a bit because one of the examples I had to give did not work, though at 18 minutes I had finished with the questions of a total of 25 minutes I had assigned.

Finally, the event which was my goal came: PyCon 2010. The talk, as I mentioned, was the same about external libraries. Was the turn to expose on Saturday and unlike of previous events I liked how I gave it.. I had prepared everything for the examples not to fail and I went well with timing. I have to admit that I not really liked how I responded to more than one question.

Finally, I gave the same talk at the PyDay Córdoba 2011. This time the talk was good (from my point of view) and by the questions asked I was able to see that people did understand what I spoke.