Why?

Our VMUG did not have a presenter lined up, so I figured it was time to pay my “dues” so to speak. I came up with the idea of covering #BackToTheBasics inside of VMWare pertaining to performance, Which included vNuma, ESXTOP, and snapshots. Which I have found have been heavy-hitting performance issues in my environments. This seemed like a great time to brush up on my first presentation since high school that wasn’t me blabbering and rambling through 5-10 mins of how-tos for a group of people.

How did I prepare?

Who prepares? I am a millennial so we kind of wing it and hope for the best….. Lol jk. I started by making the executive decision to pre-record my demos beforehand to not tempt the demo gods about how they could mess me up on that evening. I did some very rudimentary and crude quick 5-10 second clips on ESXTOP and its various screens. I did change all the font to yellow on black, which was one of my best moves during this whole endeavor. I fumbled through taking various videos and cropping them so that they could be autoplayed in the PowerPoint and would almost look like I was doing it live. “Look Ma! No hands!” Something I discovered along the way is that getting a screenshot of a spreadsheet to be legible in PowerPoint is quite difficult.

Day Of

I ran through my slides 3 times to make sure everything looked good. I even added some notes under the slides that I failed to use during my presentation. Three hours before the presentation, I realize I didn’t have a presentation remote to run the slides. So, I was either going to nervously move around the stage while presenting or risk being stuck in front of my laptop where I could panic the most. I quickly reached out to another VMUG member to pick one up for the presentation. As an added bonus our VMUG would now have one in our kit for future use.

I packed up and took off towards town. I live in the middle of “nowhere”, which about 40 mins from the venue. About 10 mins into the drive, I had a mild panic attack thinking I forgot my USB-C to USB-A Dongle because Apple… I dove to the side of the road and found that the adapter was already in my bag. Thanks, Past Justin! The rest of the trip was uneventful. I get there to test my PowerPoint demo; everything works flawlessly and the words were crisp thanks to the font color. I was ready to go.

Presentation Time!

David Prows, The Man, The Legend, The vExpert, and Fellow VMUG Leader kicked us off with our standard opening with the agenda and various news that our VMUG Members would find useful. Before I knew it, I was mic’d up, on stage, being recorded and ready to go. <Link to youtube at a later date> I went through some of my opening slides covering “Who I Am?” then jumped right into the ESXTOP information describing %RDY and various columns that I have documented and sourced in my PowerPoint. Then it happens…

DUN! DUN! DUN!!

I had a slide full of memory specs come up and my mind went blank on why I put this information on there. I panicked a bit, but my group laughed it off when I said “Hey I tossed this in there… It’s important but I can’t remember exactly why I put it in here.” Luckily I slipped right onto the next slide and picked up on networking in ESXTOP. My group was super responsive in asking questions in context to gain a good understanding and I appeared to have the rooms attention. I was feeling pretty good about the presentation.

FIN

I can’t wait until I do another presentation, whether I do the same presentation or continue develop more on this presentation as I already have about 35 mins worth of content. I have several ideas for various presentations that I would like to present on revolving around automation, performance, documentation, and things I tinker with in my spare time. This has driven me to get my “first” blog post up and going so that on my next presentation I’ll have a post for users that they can go and review what I covered. This is the story of going from paranoid of public speaking to wanting to do more of it!