Hey all, I’m back after attending SQL Saturday in Iceland. This week’s going to be busy!

I’ve said before that SQL Saturday Iceland was the first time that I presented a full hour session. It seemed to go well although having it start at 14:50 wasn’t the best as I was kinda nervous so I stressed out for most of the day! But done now and I was pretty pleased with it as I finished on time whilst getting all my material in and I answered all the questions.

I don’t really want to write an “Advice for first time presenters” post as there are plenty of them out there but I will say a couple of things that really helped me. First one, don’t wing it. I made notes on each of the slides that I had in my deck and worked through them one by one to make sure I got everything in that I wanted to say. I then grabbed a meeting room after hours in work and went through it over and over, making sure that it flowed nicely and that I got used to referring to slides whilst talking.

Also, my demos would have required a lot of typing and parts that required things like server bounces which would have taken too long to do live so I invested in decent video editing software and it paid for itself imho. The demos worked well and I was able to talk whilst they were playing, something that I don’t think that I’d have been able to do if I was doing everything live.

So all in all, really chuffed that I’ve done it and it’s now onto SQL Bits!

Final word, Iceland is an absolute amazing country. I hired a car and went driving round for a couple of days and the scenery is nothing sort of spectacular. My advice, if you have an chance, go.

Have a good week!