This year's September, I was asked by my manager at Baseconnect to give a lightning talk to a startup community made by AWS called AWS Startup Community. I was pleasantly surprised even though I had no speech experience as an Engineer. Without a second thought, I agreed to give my lighting talk.

Preparation

After agreeing to speak, I was given some time to prepare it. I began building presentation slides. It was a tech event, so I talked about my project, where I was responsible for architecting servers with AWS. We used a rather unpopular service of AWS and managed to create a great outcome with it, making me think that people would like to hear it.

Done with the slides, I asked them to review my slides. My manager, an SRE engineer, and I gathered in a meeting and heard my presentation. I got a lot of feedback on my way of presenting and errors in technical content. I'm glad to have colleagues that have my back.

Finally, we asked the design team to decorate my slides. It was mind-blowing. Here is the first page. It says, "Implementation of Processing Large Amounts of Data using Serverless".

Mainly talked about leveraging AWS serverless services (Lambda, API Gateway, and AWS Batch) to make high-availability and low-cost services. It was similar to my blog post that I published this May.

Event Day

The event was held in Osaka, Japan. At that time, I was in Indonesia, so all the speakers were onsite except me, who talked through video call.

I woke up in the morning, brushed my teeth, ate my breakfast, and rehearsed it many times. From morning until it was my turn, late evening at 9 PM. I was nervous.

Not only is this my first presentation as an engineer, but other keynote speakers are also amazing people. The Head of Product Development, CTO, and Co-Founder speak at that event. The cherry on top, when it came to my turn to speak, there was a technical problem, and my turn was pushed to last. Again I was nervous.

However, a few minutes before my turn, I calmed. I don't know why, but my heartbeats are slowed, my mind is clear, and I can normally speak. The presentation went well.

Several days later, I received an email with comments about my presentation. It was nice to know that people took an interest in what you said.

Closing

As an introverted engineer, I know how hard it is to talk to many peoples. But an opportunity like this won't come forever, and I want to seize every opportunity to the best of my ability.