Mohammad S Anwar

On the day of the event, I reached the center at about 8:45 am with plenty of time to go through the registration procedure. I have been attending the London Perl Workshop for the last 4 years. But this year was little special as I was giving a talk, thanks to Neil Bowers. In fact he helped me prepare the notes and sharing his own experiences.

I was assigned "Room 2" for my talk. When I got there I realised that I didn't have the right connector to connect my laptop with the big screen. Dave Cross was also giving a talk in the same room and he suggested I talk to Mark Keating. Luckily, Mark had spare connector for me. I was sorted and ready to go. I still had 3 hours before my talk, so I attended the talk by Dave Cross about what new features added to perl.

My talk was scheduled to start at 12:30 pm and I reached "Room 2" about 5 minutes before the scheduled time. I saw about 20 people already in the room. Initially I was confused and thought may be this was not my room. I checked the official chart again. Still not sure why there were so many people. When I saw Neil Bowers in the audience then I realised that this really was my room.

I connected my laptop and noticed the battery was dead. Power pack at the ready, it was soon booting up again. 5 minutes later everything was ready. I had my powerpoint presentation on the desktop, so that I didn't have to look anywhere. I just double clicked the file to start the presentation. To my surprise the presentation started in auto mode, and the slides were changing before I had even started. I was really nervous as I had no clue what was going on. I kept calm and start checking the settings of the presentation. Finally after little struggle I managed to get everything in place and ready to start.

I started my talk with my first slide on and completely forgot to move slide as the talk progressed. At that point, I realised my talk is not in sync with the slides. After a point, I gave up on the slides and just carried on my talk. My audience seemed to enjoy my talk and not bothered what the slides had to say. When I get into the story telling mode, nobody can stop me.Neil Bowers pointed out at the end that I need to check on my timing.

I really enjoyed the experience after initial nervous moments. Some of the attendees came to me at the end of the talk and thanked me personally. It meant a lot to me, and I feel confident enough now that I am ready for my next talk. I have an idea what I am going to talk also, something along the line of "Life of CPAN contributor".

A few days later I took a look at the favourite talks chart on the official website. To my surprise, I got 10 stars, which is very encouraging considering this was my first talk.

Thanks to

There is no entry fee for LPW, and that's only possible with the help of the generous sponsors. So thanks to Adzuna, Booking.com, CV Library, Eligo, Geek University, Magnum Solutions, Opus VL, Perl Careers, Science Photo Library, Shadowcat Systems, The Englightened Perl Organisation, Floss UK, Perl 6 Developers, Perl Weekly, and the University of Westminster.

I'd also like to thank not only Mark Keating, but all the volunteers who help make it such a good event.