My First Meetup Group Talk

One of my goals for this year was to give a talk at a meetup.  At the time I set my goals, I was attending several different groups, including the local Ruby on Rails, EmberJS, and HTML groups, but always as a spectator, never as a contributer.  I wanted to change that.

Going to EmberConf in the spring of 2014 really got me excited for Ember and encouraged me to try and give back a bit within that community.  Ian and the crew at Cirro were doing a valiant job of running the local Ember group, and were always looking for someone to present on topics.

I picked what I consider to be a fairly easy topic to present on, which was a retrospective on Ember Conf.  I didn't need to come up with any new material, instead I just needed to curate the massive amount of information that came from the conference.

My talk went fairly well, there were about 20 developers in attendance, and I think most of them came away with a few new nuggets of new information, which was my goal.

I was interested in how much time I would need to prepare for the talk, so I kept track.  Keep in mind that I wasn't coming up with material for the talk, just curating information and filling gaps in my knowledge about the topics I was presenting on.  For a 30-ish minute talk, I spent about 10 hours in preparation.

Here are the slides in text form from my talk, if interested.

I hope to present more in the future!