Work is nonstop, but I also have almost as much (if not more) going on with my Postgres Community activities (and what’s not). The things that are falling apart are so many that I do not want to talk about them. If I didn’t receive some positive signals from the Universe, I would assume that the Universe is telling me to give up on half of the things I am doing.
On the talk preparation side, I had to prepare three different versions of my security talk: a forty-minute talk for PG Day Chicago, a twenty-minute talk for Lighting Talks at the office, and a five-minute talk for DevOpsDay Chicago.
The last one was the most difficult and took more time than the other two combined. The problem was not even five minutes, but other requirements. Usually, I plan one slide per minute, and I know that this averages correctly. However, at this event, they requested twenty slides for a five-minute talk, and they will automatically advance a slide every 15 seconds!
I never had to do anything like that! At first, it seemed like an impossible task. Also, I was not allowed to use animation; it had to be twenty slides, not twenty clicks. I had to learn how to set up a slide show and rehearsed multiple times, each time making changes to the slides. It sounds unbelievable how much I worried about this five minutes! However, that’s the first time I was invited to talk at the DevOpsDay, and my goal is to spark interest and to make sure people approach me and talk with me after the presentation. That means the presentation has to be flawless.
I finished it last night and submitted the slides to the conference, and only then I realized how much it bothered me! I am leaving to Pasadena tomorrow, and it feels like a 40-minute talk on a different topic in front of a very large audience is less stressful 🙂
Hettie's Reflections 
Oh my. These are really stressful requirements and one cannot survive without much rehearsal. I doubt the approach, but in this case it is about teasing, not teaching. Maybe it works. But the audience it is quite stressful, too, to listen to several presentations in that tempo.
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Five – minute lighitng talks is a normal format for one session in a conference. Usually it accomodate speakers who either didn’t make a cut for the ragular talks, or somebody who decided the last-minute.
But usually it’s up to a speaker how many slides and the timing. At that conference, they have it for 30min and in the middle: https://devopsdays.org/events/2025-chicago/program
We’ll see!
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