Meteor Impact

Recently, I presented my first online talk ever at Meteor Impact. The talk was called “Securing Your Meteor Application” detailing my learnings about Meteor’s security and the tips I learnt reading Secure Meteor.

I was super intimidated since this talk was to be made in English which isn’t my naitve language and was quite fearful of how people would perceive it. Would they be able to understand me, I pondered. This wasn’t my first talk per se, I did present at EgyptJS, a local meetup, before. But doing it in a foregin language was quite new for me. The speakers had two options either present the talk live or pre-record it, I went with the latter since I wasn’t confident in my internet connection and pre-recording things would be a lot more comfortable.

The talk had a span of 30 minutes, so the plan was to create 30-40 slides thinking each slide would take me around a minute to explain and it’s always better to finish early than to be late.

I always try to write some sort of script to go along with the slides where I practise them but my talks always end up a mix of what I memorized plus some improvisation.

Once the slides were done, I started practising. Much to my dismay, my mobile phone headset isn’t good for recording, it can easily pick up on noises in the background and even the slightest tap or breath. I waited late into the night where everybody was asleep and started recording. BTW, OBS Studio is a phenomenal software. The recording ended up being around 11 minutes which was way below the set time for the talk, 30 minutes that’s. But I chose not to extend the talk further since I didn’t want to bloat the talk with useless stuff even it wasn’t much.

At the day of the talk, I made sure to be there early to answer any of the attendees questions. And, the talk went alright actually. The attendees liked it but they cristised the length issue. Thankfully, another attendee took notes of the talk.

All in all, I’m quite happy how it went as I thought it’d be met with negative response due to the language barrier but the community was so welcoming and positive. And this surely pushed me forward to do more talks and contribute back to the Meteor community.