"Hey Corey, how did you learn to give talks?" It's story time!
It started when @saltstack was first in development. "This is amazing, why aren't more people talking about this?" "Go for it." So I did.
My first public talk was @pleia2 inviting me to speak at BALUG. I put a bunch of documentation into a slide deck and read it to the audience. It turns out she's super nice even when your talk is garbage.
I gradually improved from there, but my real breakthrough was as a contracted traveling trainer for @puppetize.
This was pre-Docker. Puppet was all the rage, and had been for a while; ergo a lot of the students were convinced that Puppet was going to take their jobs away. They were wrong, of course; @awscloud would do that instead.
Also, with all love and respect to Puppet: in this era the demos didn't always go so well. So you had students paying medium dollars for a training that often hit snags. The situation was delicate.
And of course, if I got poor speaker ratings I presumably would be thrown off the engagement. Fear can be a powerful motivator.
I gradually got more comfortable. "This is how the Schedule resource type works. It's a window where things may happen. It doesn't guarantee they'll happen, and they probably won't; like a @comcast service appointment. Where do you work? Oh, Comcast? That's Comcastic."
The first few times teaching a class it's terrifying, but you get used to it. It fits into pattern recognition super easily. "Oh, that demo broke for you? You're missing a comma on line 4" without getting up makes you look super competent.
The key is to power through, and find a style that works for you. Everyone's journey is different; this was mine.
