I am giving a talk titled "Intro to Rust" at the OpenWest conference in Utah on July 12th, 2017.
I would love some feedback on the talk, especially about anything I say or show that is incorrect in any way.
I know my delivery isn't the greatest -- this will be my first conference talk and this is just a practice run where I mostly read what I plan on saying -- tips for improving delivery are welcome as well!
Here is the link to my practice run of the talk.
Hi @CleanCut thank you for sharing this Video.
Before I give you some feedback I would like to know which tool are you using for capturing and changing syntax color, highlighting and gray out?
First, I want to talk about the things I find very good and all in all you made a good job!
Your voice is clear and the speed is fine, even with 1.25 or 1.5 speed and for me, as a non-native speaker, this was well good understandable.
I like the syntax samples, highlighting and focus.
Second, I ask myself what kind of audience is this intended to?
There is a lot of information about the Language and for an audience who would like to know more of the inside of the language e.g. someone who would read and fly over parts of "The Book". For someone who is curious about Rust and the details, this Video is good for and you could publish it. I would recommend it.
If your audience is new to Rust and maybe hear the first time about, Id would recommend focusing on the parts of Rust that make it unique.
As you did in the first 11:23 minutes.(Cargo, compiling and error handling)
From 11: 24 to 25:45 there is much useful information but maybe too much for someone who hears the firsts time about Rust or is not a programmer.
These are in my opinin the other parts that make Rust special:
Ownership
Borrowing
Concurrency/Multithreading
Traits
The following talks maybe go to deep into detail for your audience but
there you can get some inspiration.
If you do not already know here are three talks I like to recommend.
Keynote - Rust: confident, productive systems programming by Aaron Turon
Emily Dunham - Keynote: Spreading The Rust from minute 8:47
Intro to the Rust programming language
All that written out this is only my opinion and my five cents,
is wish you much luck and fun with your talk and keep up your good work.
Thank you so much for your feedback, and the links to those talks! To address your questions:
I am using Apple Keynote for the presentation software. I manually type out the code and manually select characters and set their color similar to what the color scheme I'm using in my editor does. To gray things out, I copy the slide and then change the colors of parts of the text to gray manually. It takes a long, long time to manage it all in Keynote.
OpenWest is a conference about Open Source software, where most attendees are software developers, or people who work closely with them (testers, product managers, etc.)
I don't know how new the audience will be to Rust, but my guess is that they will be very new.
Hi @CleanCut (Nathan),
I found your talk very good, I'd say it was one of the better ones I've seen so far 
I think a lot of talks are a bit hand-wavy about the syntax/implementation of the language and focus on the benefits, I like this talk as it is very clear with good examples.
I really liked your example of borrowing (at 41.00 thereabouts) I really like examples that explain the 'manual' way and the easy/idiomatic way as they make the examples easier to understand what's going on under the hood.
Overall it was a great talk, the only thing I'd suggest is to move the part about what you didn't cover to the end, you could probably reduce the installation part down to 'read the doc's' as they are very clear and easy to follow and use the saved time to expand the traits example a bit or the borrowing example.
Thanks again, your talk made a few things clearer for me and let us know when you do the talk and post it up, good luck!
Mick
Mick, thank you for your feedback!
I like your suggestion about shortening the installation part and moving the "what you missed" part to the end.
If I get some way to post my own talk after I give it, I will definitely put up a link to that for you guys.