Woo-hoo! I have just stepped off the stage at the Mac Admins' Conference 2022 in Brighton, UK, and i have survived! My presentation on Security for humans went without much catastrophy and nearly within the allotted time. I received rather enthusiastic applause and several people actually came up to me and told me the the presentation was good! Even more importantly, many people have talked with me that it indeed seems important to involve humans in the security loop. Success!

If you were there, here are my slides. If you were not, they probably are quite useless.

If there’s anything i need to learn, it is to start working ahead of time. And i mean radically ahead of time, like one COVID pandemic ahead of time … which technically is what i had but pretty cleanly managed to ignore. I had enough foresight to arrive in UK on Sunday evening so i could have the whole Monday to practice on my talk and then go for pre-conference get togethers. Little did i know.

Little did i plan that on Monday, all of it, i’d be putting my talk together, rehearsing it, compacting it, creating slides, creating speaker notes, missing beer with my conference-chums, rehearsing it again, and falling over in bed at 02:30 in the morning-night, then waking up at 07 to rehearse again. Yeah, i managed to take a walk during Monday for lunch and a coffee, but it would have been way nicer to spend some time looking at the city or meet-and-greeting folks from the conference. Still, i’m happy i arrived as early as i did. Otherwise it would have been a disaster.

Another flip side which comes from not doing things in time is that i don’t get to re-hash my presentation. I had an original idea which of talking about The Human Sysadmin which was transformed in to Security for humans, and i was able to slightly fix the content between the first (and only) draft and the talk that went into production. But really what i missed out on was to have a Version Zero, giving it to a test audience, gathering feedback, looking at the video recording, and then creating a production release. Not sure if that’s how the pros do, but based on the book Resonate by Nancy Duarte, this is the least what a pro should do.