And I didn’t do too bad; wish I had done better. I said that when I was done, I felt like it was a “B” level presentation, and it was; I got a 4 out of 5 on my evals. If I had been a less experienced speaker, I would be thrilled with that; as it stands, I’m a little bummed. I know that it’s tough to get accepted to speak at Summit, and I feel bad that I didn’t hit this one out of the park.
However, it was a great experience; 73 people attended my session, which is a big audience for me. I struggled with my demos throughout (I don’t even want to listen to the audio because I’m worried about how bad it was), and I should have worked on finding ways to better connect with my audience. The feedback I got was really constructive:
Was a good intro, just would have liked to have seen some broader examples. For example converting XML into relational tables, not in detail but just at a high level.
Lots of demos geared towards people who have already written a lot of XQuery. This should have been a 201 session. A discussion on why you’d even use the XML datatype would have been useful. What problem does the XML datatype even solve for people?
I think I would have benefitted from a hard copy (gasp) of the XML data. I would have been able to see the data and compared it to your on screen results
Way too fast, too ambitious for a 101 session
Well put together and paced. Very clear and coherent
Scale back expectations if it really is a 101 level session
So it sounds like I didn’t do the best job of making my abstract clear; people had different expectations than what I had for what a 100 level course was supposed to be. I do agree that it was too much content, and if I present on the topic again, I’ll be sure to go back to splitting this up to focus on the basics of XPath, and save a discussion of FLWOR for later. Also, I really should have used demos much more judiciously; I kept running code and trying to work the magnifier, when I should have just used slides for the basics, and then done a much more thorough demo.
So what did I learn? Connect with the audience first and foremost. If I could have kept them engaged and entertained, I may have covered less material, but may have inspired them to do more research on their own (which in the end, is the point of this whole exercise).
