I mentioned last week that I was speaking at the Secure360 conference here in the Twin Cities, and at that time I was preparing a talk called Pentesting 101: No Hoodie Required. I was so nervous that I’ve basically spent the last week breathing heavily into paper bags and wishing I was on sedatives.

But I have good news to report in today’s episode, friends! The talk was very well received and the attendees didn’t get out torches and pitchforks! #winning! So today’s episode (audio below) talks more about the public speaking experiences and highlights some lessons learned:

Things I’d do again next time

• I’d not tempt the demo gods and still pre-record my hacking movies ahead of time. I saw some people do live demos of very technical things and it did not go well for a few of them 🙁

• I would still spend way too many hours cutting together my movies in iMovie so that they followed a good tempo when presented live

• I would still have a copy of my presentation on two different laptops, 3 USB thumb drives, a cloud copy, and a copy sent to the Secure 360 folks just in case. Backups, backups, backups – am I right?

What I’d do differently next time

• I’d hopefully have the preso done a few days (weeks, even!) ahead of time and practice it in front of colleagues to get some feedback.

• I’d still have a theme to the presentation, but rather than something specific like Terminator 2, maybe I’d go even more general and pick a movie/character that could appeal even more to the masses.

• I wouldn’t worry so much about having a presentation that "nails it" for everybody. That’s just not possible! We’re all coming from different backgrounds and skillsets. It’s not gonna be a home run for everybody.