On Stage!

Ignite Speakers, a photo by O'Reilly Conferences on Flickr.

One of my personal goals for the year has been to do more public speaking and despite my best efforts to procrastinate on that, it's been happening. Yesterday afternoon I was asked to be a part of Ignite, which is a fun style of presenting, generally where you get 20 slides that each automatically advance after 20 seconds. The host for this conference's Ignite incorporated a slot where ten volunteers improvised commentary on five slides each (sometimes known as PowerPoint Karaoke) and I was one of those volunteers. I was desperately hoping that more than ten other people would volunteer and I would be off the hook, but it was not to be. And I'm glad! It was fun and I got through it and hopefully that will help my confidence for next time. Who knows, maybe I could actually plan some sort of speaking engagement. I was also one of two women speakers during the event, and I was glad to represent the ladies.

Pinar, our fab conference photographer, took this shot of me--professional shooters, another advantage to speaking at conferences!