Inaugural Sheffield Geekup

Last night I attended and spoke at the First Sheffield Geekup held at the Fat Cat in Sheffield. My talk was entitled “Deploying Web Projects with Subversion” and you can see the slides for that at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/deploying-web-projects-with-svn/.

Overall I think the event was well-organised, there were certainly plenty of people there and we had a projector, speakers and a room so it pretty much ticked all the boxes. The Fat Cat is a nice pub, with good beer, but for those of us coming from further afield it was a bit tricky to get to as its not exactly handy for the station. The evening was good however I felt that the timings slipped badly – I was the first speaker and although there was somthing else happening earlier on, the talks aimed for 7:30 were actually nearer 9pm … so a couple of pints later than I was expecting my audience to be and I think my talk came across as rather dry as a result! Also since one of the speakers ran over his time completely (now I understand why other geekups sit with a stopwatch and click the slides through for you!), I had about ten minutes after the talks to hand out a couple of business cards and answer a few quick questions before I had to dash off for my train. All of these though are only teething problems and I think everyone had a pretty good time, so well done to Jag for getting it off the ground … here’s to next month!

3 thoughts on “Inaugural Sheffield Geekup

  1. I think the timing for the talks is something Jag will be working on for next time. You timing, however, was impeccable, as Ian Ibbotson pointed out! I wouldn’t say your talk was too dry but that you perhaps tried to cover too much in 6 minutes (which I think I did too). I didn’t get a chance to talk to you after the show but I wanted to say that your presentation technique was excellent. Good luck with the main event in Holland :)

  2. Tamlyn: Thanks for the vote of confidence :) Its a tricky one because with 20 slides you can either do basics or interesting stuff, there isn’t room for both. I very much enjoyed your talk, great slide design and images as well – very nice!

  3. Today I leave for Amsterdam, to visit the Dutch PHP Conference where I will be getting my first experience as a conference speaker. It would be fair to say that I’m very nervous – its a high profile event and the other speakers in the lineup are pretty a

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