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Nicked from Brian at Crimzn.com

We had our third Ignite Cardiff last night. It was great, I think. But I enjoyed it least out of all of them. We were in a different venue from normal (the utterly beautiful WMC), but it became pretty stressful because of a whole load of technical issues, all because of one unforeseen variable – we changed laptops at the last minute. For some reason Claire’s laptop didn’t work with the WMC’s screens and so we thought we’d transfer all the talks to my laptop and just use that. No problem, right?

Wrong.

I may be over-exaggerating a little, and I’m told that it seemed no big deal out in the crowd. But it certainly made our lives sweatier than they should have been! I’m sure there’s a bunch of lessons here about testing, being prepared, introducing variables at the last minute, but I just know that we’re using Claire’s laptop next time. I must add, though, that the WMC were amazing and helpful in trying to help us keep on top of our self-induced gremlins!

I also have to say that from the feedback, which I’ve been reading over a cuppa and with a big smile this morning, it seems like the speakers were really well received. And they were all brilliant. And Brian from Crimzn very kindly filmed them all so we should hopefully have them online sometime soon.

One of the points of my talk was that by publicly committing to doing things you are more likely to do them, and hopefully will learn something in the process. I learned that because you were so busy organising things, and therefore not actually having any time to learn or practice your talk, you don’t realise that you actually tried to cram too much in, so just it comes out as one incoherent, rambled mess! I hope some of my points came across in the process, anyway. But next time I won’t be speaking at one of my own events.

Next up, TEDxCardiff…