Last week I gave my “unit testing in the wild” presentation on LIDNUG. It was nice, and once the recording is up I’ll get all the info. But I wanted to talk about the experience.
First of all: people, I’ve hit the jackpot. I’ve hit on one of the best way
s to extract gold out of lead. Almost. I’ve figured how to make time to prepare for the presentation: Traffic.
Ok, I’m sure people did that before cars, like riding their horse and carriage and practicing their PowerPoint pitch. They probably had more time. But for the 21st century, in which I spend 1.5-2 hrs a day in commute – this is no longer podcast listening time – it’s talk to yourself time. Sure you look weird, but it’s great practice time. Repeat, repeat, and try not to bump into the car in front.
The how-to: I print my slides with notes, and start talking to the steering wheel. Basically simple. Allow yourself to get excited, it really helps.
Back to the presentation. Man, it’s hard getting no feedback. Online is usually bad enough when you have to rely on vocal feedback, when people talk to you (this happens when I do an online demo). But an online broadcast- no online feedback at all.
Since you don’t know how you’re doing without feedback, you need to control and modify what you’re doing, or go with the flow and do your best. Since I find doing 2 things at a time quite problematic, I go with the flow.
Finally, I’ll go to the beginning – selecting the topic. I went through a couple of thinking cycles here. I could do basic unit testing stuff, or advanced. I could also do a lap around the Typemock tools.
I finally decided to look at unit testing differently – solving different unit testing problems. This was no longer about the tools (which of course were presented), but about: hey, you may have bumped into this once, next time, here’s how you go around it.
If you attended, give me a shoutout, and give me feedback. If not, I hope the recording will be up soon so you can do that as well.