• Perf VC team did a great job making sure we had everything lined up prior to the event. This may seem like a little thing, but it’s nice to have it pushed to me instead of having to figure it out.
• Erin had music playing so that everyone could verify audio, was nice that I could verify as well early on (connected early to make sure)
• Nice to have some introduce you, they can use more superlatives than you can use yourself, and it does add credibility going into the presentation
• I uploaded my deck instead of sharing it, and I relied on embedded screen shots. Works well enough for a general presentation strategy, hoping it turned out to be a smoother experience for the attendees. If you try this, allow about 5 minutes for it to upload the deck, and page up/down don’t seem to work on the slides unless you go to full screen mode. There are up/down arrows on the bottom/left corner of LM to let you navigate.
• I also right clicked my name on the attendee list and checked the boxes to share my contact info, don’t know if it helped
• Little things matter; at the end of the introduction Erin verified I was there and that she could hear me, making sure any problems were resolved right then
• Maybe it’s still being new at virtual presentations, but I think it’s harder to visualize questions. Doesn’t make sense, but seems that way! I wish we could get the question added to the deck in mid-stream, or at least on screen in a big font, good for me and attendees.
• Still that feeling of being disconnected from the attendees, nature of the media, but it makes it harder, I think tends to drive monotone, in person I think you can tell when to push a little more, be a little louder.

Definitely need more practice.

• Dual presenters can suck, or be very powerful. Trying to share presentation is hard, a great fit (at least for code) is one narrating high level, one doing code and narrating low level. It takes work to make this work.
• Avoid rhetorical questions. You look like an idiot when you’re waiting for an answer but the audience doesn’t care. This normally happens when the speaker tries a few warmup questions just prior/after start. Better is to ask for non-verbal to start with, call for a ‘show of hands’ a couple times and then move to asking for comments based on those.
• You’re there to teach. Not entertain. Anything – anything - you do that isn’t about how or why to do something is a distraction that makes learning harder. Does that mean you can’t be funny or have a light hearted approach? Not at all. It’s valid as a way to get them engaged, but don’t start counting how many laughs you get.
• You’re there to teach. Not mandate, not humiliate. You may believe that solution X is the only way to do something. Fine, show us why that’s good, the downside of solution Y and Z. But learn to find ways to get some good out of non optimal solutions too. The ideal for me is to say “step 1 is to solve the problem” and here are some variations. Let me show you why I think you should do it this way and how to do it. Don’t berate me because I find it valuable to do it a different way.

I’ll say again my thoughts on presenters – give me the person that’s passionate but not a zealot. Looking back at this week, my favorite presenters were the ones that were passionate about a topic and it showed. It wasn’t a cold practical technical hour, they got me excited about what they were teaching.

The secret? Windows-X

Win-X brings up the mobility center:

To configure, click the little projector icon and you’ll see this:

Do the little bit of configuration it offers, and then you can toggle it on/off easily. I wish they had gone a step or two further:

• Option to hide all the objects on the desktop or switch to an alternate desktop
• Adjust the power settings to make sure the machine doesn’t go into power save while you’re talking
• Hide or disable instant messages and other notifications (I don’t think these count as “system” notifications that it suppresses

Still, it’s useful, and makes me wonder why I haven’t looked for something like this before now.