Today I performed developer’s meeting on AutoMapper. I would say that it went good, but I did not really enjoy it and will explain why. But I do not regret doing this presentation and will explain why.

Why am I upset of today’s presentation delivery?

Not so many people got interested in theme, that I’ve decided to present. There were about 10 or less developers in conference room. I really expected to have bigger audience and had prepared to speak to other division of our software business unit. But I believe there are some reasons why I did not get many listeners.

Few important thoughts for presenters that encounter the same

Never be disappointed by the number of attendees.. at least at the beginning, so this will not decrease quiality of your speach.

If topic of you speech is not really popular it doesn’t mean that you should discount its value.

If topic is indeed simple don’t neglect your preparations. For some reason I even wasn’t a bit nervous before presentation, as I’m usually are and I don’t find this to be good.

Take a look around, you probably will see those who are interested in topic and those who are simply excited by your presentations. Special thank to today’s attendees, without you I would have to talk to walls.

For future pay more attention on actuality and popularity of the topic. I personally going to create monkeysurvey to get that information.

With smaller audience you get more feedbacks. Why? Easily, they feel more relaxed and you have more time to allocate to each of them. In today’s presenation I got so many interesting questions and figured them out for myself and for audience online, while writing code. That was amazing.

Try to understand those who did not participate. Probably they counted to be more reasonable to spend that hour on some urgent issues or they discounted topic, since they are sure that will not need AutoMapper. And if they even will need it, it is quite possible to learn it in amount of couple of hours.

Still be proud of yourself. This is must be, otherwise you will lose confidence which costs a lot.

Presentation

For my presentation I’ve used already existing posts on AutoMapper, also for the end of presentation I had real world usage examples.

And here is presentation itself:

View more presentations from Andriy Buday.

Don’t forget to check out my article on AutoMapper here.