Today my first Sue Student Edition happened. Well not entirely true, it happened a few times already and I was present most of the times. But today was somewhat special. I gave the keynote before my coworker Tijmen did a presentation + workshop. And I recapped the event afterwards.
Digital edition
As Covid is still around very much and restrictions are in place all over, we needed to host this event on our digital platform. For me that was the first time doing a talk on a digital event. Ofcourse as coach for Sue I do this daily, but not as speaker with polls and such. It is good that we practised a bit upfront to be familiar with the tools.
One of my main worries was that with live audience you can influence the setting a lot. You can interact with people and see the audience and whether they pay attention or fell asleep. With a digital audience you cannot see those signs that easily. People are not required to enable their camera for example, so things can be hidden from you. People can watch different things and pretend that they are watching your talk.
But, at the start we had a good conversation with people from the audience and we talked about the difference between live and digital education. They too find it more difficult to interact with others during digital sessions. Ofcourse there are benefits as well. You can sleep a bit longer because no need to travel.
The talks
I gave a talk about “Infrastructure and security”, zooming in on Security Essentials and using the C-I-A triad. By using several polls I tried to interact with the audience, which worked out above expectation. Since I have long term experience in the field I could use several examples from actual situations and found a few more on the internet which I used in the slides as well. During the talk we had several discussions with the audience which made the talk interactive. Thank you for that to the audience! I went a bit over time because of that and I think it is awesome to have such interaction. I was allowed to introduce my colleague Tijmen who took over the talk and went in depth with security concepts, tools and offered an actual hacking workshop with selfmade boxes.
Thanks
I think the event was a succes and feedback from the audience suggested that as well. It could not have been such a success without the help and support of Sue B.V., Laura, Tijmen, Koen, Patrick, Raimond and ofcourse the audience. I hope that I will be able to attend and/or talk at such an event again and hopefully meet you again where we can discuss during a drink.