This year I had two personal goals to keep improving myself

• Submit an article for in a technical magazine
• Give a talk on a conference

As you may have read on my blog I reached my first goal twice:

• writing an article about mobile testing for NLJUG, the Dutch Java User Group
• write a chapter in the book “The Digital Quality Handbook: Guide for Achieving Continuous Quality in a DevOps Reality” by Eran Kinsbruner.

I also tried to reach my second goal. So I submitted an abstract for SauceCon 2017 in San Francisco (the first-ever Sauce Labs user conference) and SeleniumConf 2017 in Berlin. Sadly both my abstracts were not accepted. But there is always hope.

A few months ago Eran contacted me and asked if I would like to give a webinar with him about the chapter I wrote for his book. There were so many questions about Javascript automation and especially Protractor that this chapter was a perfect match for a webinar. It was also a perfect match for me to reach my second goal,

“Give a talk on a conference or give a webinar”.

And yes, I’m allowed to adjust my goals a bit 😉

Preparation

The preparation for the webinar wasn’t that hard. I know Protractor and Javascript / TypeScript, I could prepare the examples and the time schedule, but I had the feeling that I could not prepare the nervousness in combination with the time schedule. I wanted to tell so much, but there was not enough time and that gave me the biggest pressure.

I tried to reduce the nervousness and pressure by preparing a demo. The demo was divided into 3 parts that would explain all the points I would like to show. The demo project can be found here. The second step was to write down all the points I wanted to discuss / show on paper. The last step was to do some dry runs at home.

The webinar

Thursday the 27^th of July was THE day for me. The day I would have my first webinar. When the webinar started I had the feeling that I had drunk more than 20 espressos and you could see my heartbeat in my neck. But that’s the advantage of a webinar, nobody can see it.

After a few minutes I really got comfortable and had the impression I did a good first webinar. You can view the webinar here

and download the slides here.

Some figures

Normally when you attend a conference you are always curious about the amount of visitors for your talk so here are some figures about the webinar:

• About 1500 people registered to attend the webinar
• Over the whole webinar an average of 250 people watched the whole live webinar
• There was a peak that more than 360 people watched the live webinar

Conclusion

It was an awesome experience to give a webinar, so Eran, thanks again for giving me the opportunity.

The coming days I will view my webinar again and again and again, just to keep learning from what and how I did it. I already saw some points I can improve, but I first still need to enjoy the feeling of giving the webinar and secondly reaching my second goal, even before 2017 ended!