It’s Un-SQL Friday, so all about something SQL-Adjacent. This month, something related to Lessons learned as a speaker. Ok, so that’s much easier than the last one I took part in. I’ve done a couple of presentations, and the first, well, that wasn’t so great.

So being a BI Developer, and aside from the past year or so, I previously spent pretty much the past 8-10 years writing code.  So, I’ve not done a huge amount of presentations.

However, having been to a number of developer and SQL focussed presentations, by a wide range of people, I allowed myself to be talked into doing a session. It wasn’t a long session, just 15 minutes (seemed longer…), covering an ORM (Object Relational Mapper). I’d chosen the Telerik OpenAccess one, and would be covering it as part of an ORM themed evening at our local community group (DevEvening).

So, having prepared a talk, slides, gotten some input from Telerik, and done some example code. I went off to do the session. The problem I found was that coding on the fly is bad. It can never end well, in the majority of cases.

What I’d done was write down what steps I needed to code, and although I’d run through it a few times beforehand, and had a couple of times with no issues, there is a difference between doing it at your desk, and doing it in a presentation situation. Actually, I should have had saved projects, to do each of the examples.

I know this now, and when I do my next one, something SQL related, I think, I’ll be better prepared for what I’m doing.