A talk at Codebar Brighton

I gave a talk about Sergey at Codebar Brighton on Tuesday night! Other than a post-hackathon recap, this was my first foray into public speaking - and for a first go with limited preparation time, I think it went pretty well!

I didn’t clam up too much, nor lose my train of thought, and the live coding (yep…) went without a hitch!

The slot was only ~10 minutes and I had quite a lot to get through:

• What is Sergey?
• What is a static site generator?
• When is a SSG useful?
• What other SSG options are there?
• How do you use Sergey?

The first four points were covered by a PowerPoint presentation, but much as I tried to avoid it, live coding was required for the demonstration. I took a two page website made in HTML, and extracted the header, footer and head into importable components. The latter also used a <sergey-slot /> for good measure!

I found out about the talk on Friday afternoon, so time was quite limited to prepare; fortunately I was quite comfortable talking about Sergey, given how new a project it is. In hindsight, I should’ve prepared a more thorough ‘script’ for the first section, and definitely had a round-up to close off the talk. Fortunately Cassie was on hand to point people towards the website and documentation! 🙈

Regardless, it was a really fun night, and a great, encouraging and safe event to speak at.

After the stress of the talk, I joined the coaching team, running through an introduction to JavaScript. We built a little to-do list application and and got practical experience of querySelector, addEventListener, preventDefault, createElement, and appendChild!

We took on a final feature in the last 20 minutes, which was probably a stretch time-wise. It probably would’ve been better to finally run through of the night’s coding, and add some reminder comments. So plenty to learn from!