Bright and early I got started with my own presentation today and i thought that I’d retrospect on it a bit and identify areas to improve upon.
For the most part I felt the introduction to Test Doubles and what they are flowed well, however I did speak very very quickly. In the future I’m going to try to slow down a bit (although I did get no complaints about this except from my “wife-to-be” Than).
I did some live code samples of practically every single Mockito feature and felt that this went real well (and was happy to see some “ah ha” faces in the audience over some features) but it also seemed like the live code samples were a minefield of danger waiting to happen (and there were a couple times I kind of forgot what I was going to demo next, although I kept this hidden by talking more about the previous feature).
I’ll be giving the presentation again in Des Moines on the first, so I’m going to make the following improvements going forward:
- include empty test methods from the start that I can just fill in
- Re-arrange the content a bit for better flow
- reduce slide content during the live coding session. I talked about what was on these slides while coding, so the slides just added noise that often times got skipped
- Slow the pace down a bit
Overall I was quite happy at how it turned out and glad that it ran for the full 90 minutes without any rehearsal. Thanks to all who turned in your feedback forms and if you attended the talk and didn’t, please leave me some feedback here! 
On reducing slides during the live coding part, I’d recommend keeping the slides in your deck and marking them as skipped. You can then a) use these slides as reference later when you’ve forgotten what you’re supposed to live demo and b) include them if you publish the deck somewhere or to attendees as a refresher.