My experience on the Public Speaking Challenge

#beginners #writing #publicspeaking #techtalks

Last year I discovered the DEV Community and since then this has been my favorite place to learn, share my learning journey, participate in challenges, and meet new people. I love to spend time in #discussion, debating about something, on "Welcome Thread" and moderating some novices and beginners posts too. On April 1st, @bekahhw from Virtual Coffee made a post inviting anyone in the community to join a challenge of Public Speaking. The main idea was to choose a topic, develop a well-structured and engaging talk, and present it at the end of the month, all the process was guided by the community with tips and tasks for each week. I loved the idea and was so excited about it.
For the first week, I've chosen my topic, I'd like to talk a bit about Linux and open-source projects. Things like studying OS, testing a new distro on my desktop, and completely diving into the OSSU (Open Source Society University) influenced my choices directly.
Then, I had to face one of my biggest difficulties, writing an outline with an introduction, development, and conclusion. For this presentation, each participant had 5-10 minutes to a lighting talk and I was afraid of writing something so superficial without connection or with big jumps between subtopics. As a non-native English speaker, I made an immersive month to get even more used to the language, listen to more music, watching even more videos (especially with my boyfriend whose have helped me so much with this and our long talks about OS and Kernels).
In the last week, the focus was on delivering and I did my best to don't get nervous and just try to face this as a normal talk. I have to admit that I loved to spend time creating a slide presentation like I did a lot in my Physics Bachelor for countless experiments and projects.
I have searched a lot about the Virtual Coffee community and I loved the main idea of mutual support and the meeting styles. Also, I'm on the waiting list and I hope to be in the Lightning Talks in the next year and join more and more challengers.
As how I promised, here's my presentation video:

I love this experience and I'll surely continue with this.
For now, I can't deliver such a good webcam image quality but I'll improve it very soon.
Also, feel free to connect with me, I'd love to extend the conversation or to receive some feedback.