How to go from Dunning-Krueger* to Imposter Syndrome in 3 weeks or less

This past February, the (ahem!) "illuminati" of the Moncton User Group had a problem:  No speaker lined up for March.  Now, I had already started a spiel on basic AVR microcontroller programming.  Problem was, it was intended for more of a Makerspace crowd.  Alas, the local Makerspace has been in a lull for awhile now, which left a half-finished outline languishing in a folder alongside a bunch of transition slide images.  But I figured that if I tossed out the hardware-oriented "What is a Circuit?" bits and amped up the code samples, it could be made to work...in a "niche" sort of way.

It's been roughly a year and a half since I stood up in front of my MUG colleagues to bang on about my latest nerdery.  So I knew that I was basically out of shape as a presenter.  Still, I had a bit over three weeks to finish the outline and turn it into slides, but no big deal because it's really only the bare-bones basics, plus I totally know where I'm going with it and, anyway, the Arduino presentation was so long ago that nobody will realise that I'm poaching half the image files and honestly it's not like anyone here will be starting out from scratch with a C-like programming language anyway, right???

Boy howdy, did that beastie hand ever me my head -- more than any other presentation I've given.  It was pretty humbling, even before I was regaling my shower-door with the soundtrack for the slide-deck.  :~/   I half-expected at least one of my coaches/mentors from UWEC Forensics to show up and administer a well-deserved smack upside the head.  A sampling of mistakes:

• Not verbalising sections as I finished them.  (The first few run-throughs always sound absolutely dreadful; better to break that much dreadful into smaller chunks.)
• Trying to cram too much into single slides/sections.  The last-minute right-sizing set me back to square one for the most difficult (and crucial) part of the whole thing.
• The demo. part should have been chucked overboard.  The idea was to pull everything together and mop up the important nitty-gritties that weren't covered by the basic examples.  But even contrived and oversimplified, it was too much for a fatigued group of people, smart as they are.
• Procrastinating until almost too late on wiring up an actual breadboard with the demo. project and trying to upload my sample code.  Rookie mistakes that egregious on the Friday before a Tuesday presentation is nothing short of speaker malpractice, IMLTHO.
• Procrastinating until too late for actually timing the whole presentation.  It ran close to 90 minutes end-to-end,  I figure that 75 minutes was pushing the limits of people's patience.  My last minute cuts never actually made it all the way out the door b/c of nerves.  Bad, BAD me.
• Overconfidence in how quickly I could translate my extremely n00b understanding of a subject into something that could be understood by someone coming into the subject fresh.  (Arduino has made huge inroads into the AVR space for a reason, fam!)
• And the great-grand-matriarch of all the other mistakes:  Having precisely zero practical experience before volunteering.  Don't get me wrong:  I'm a huge fan of learning by teaching, but this skirted dangerously close to the proverb about the blind leading the lame.

From the standpoints of sound and flow, it wasn't horrible -- that much, at least, can be said without relying on charity.  I learned decades ago how to fake confidence.  Despite the nerves (or maybe because of them), my ex-coaches would certainly have approved of both the volume and variety of hand-gestures and body language.  With, by the bye, no reading directly off slides (the cardinal sin of any presentation).  There were a couple of small stumbles, one slide-transition hiccup -- nothing that fazed me, even in front of my peers (a.k.a. my betters).

But there was a ominous lack of response when I ended every section/subsection with "Any questions about that?"  Uh-oh.  Which tells me that, at best, I bored just over 20 very talented people who have better things to do on a Tuesday night.  At worst, I made them lose whatever interest they might have had in AVR programming.

Cold comfort, I suppose, that I don't crawl out of the rubble entirely empty-handed.  Quite apart part from the obvious perks of thoroughly understanding the material and having a sweet set of references all in one place, nat'cherly.  And an even greater appreciation for everything that the Arduino ecosystem has accomplished. No, my personal takeaway from this three weeks of scrambling is where I need to turn my attention next.  And next.  And next.  And so on.  (Respectively, those "nexts" are Serial I/O, timers, pulse-width modulation, I2C and SPI communication, and then whatever I don't recognise while I'm tripping through all that.)

It goes (almost) without saying that I will certainly leave room in my brain for the lessons (and humility) acquired after  ear-bashing my I/T colleagues.  In another year or two, I'll be back up in front of the room.  And it's not so much a matter of living down this talk as it is living up to the standards set by the other presenters who generously share their time and knowledge (and war-stories) with us. 

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* The Dunning-Krueger Effect is the inability of a newbie to correctly assess her/his abilities in a new area of competence.