It’s been a few weeks since R/Medicine2020, a virtual conference in conjunction with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Yale School of Public Health and the R Consortium.

I presented a lightning talk to demonstrate runcharter and spccharter, which have been taking up a lot of my free time over the last year.

I was delighted to have my submission accepted, although that turned into trepidation as the actual date grew closer.

I’d love to say my presentation was spotless, and that I am an accomplished public speaker, but the reality is that I am not.

In my head, I was going to create an awesome set of xaringan slides, with additional xaringan extra goodness, but the reality was that I did not have the time or the markdown experience to learn all this to the requisite standard in the time available.

That meant Powerpoint to the rescue. It did the job.

We had the option of pre-recording our talks, and submitting them a few days beforehand. I envy those who were able to do this, but my kids were going through a ‘we’re not going to sleep’ phase (probably because of ‘back to school’ anxiety), and consequently, there was no way I was getting peace to record anything until very late at night.

Of course, I couldn’t record my talk until I’d finalised it, and, as it turns out, my final layout didn’t materialise until the night before the presentation. And even then, on the back of some last minute rehearsals in front of an almost captive audience (my sister and brother in law), I swiped 2 slides out at the last minute.

How did it go?

So how did this virtual conference work?
We had a URL to sign in on, a Slack group which alerted us, and 5 mins before our talk, we would get a notification to enter a ‘green room’ for a sound check etc before we started.

All good. Being told that I was very brave for doing a live talk when most had pre-recorded theirs did not do a lot for my nerves 🙂

The videos are all up on Youtube, and you’ll find mine in amongst them

Thanks to the 2 people who’ve given it the thumbs up.

If you do watch it, I have found the captions are surprisingly accurate for the most part.

There are of course, many other presentations to watch, allof which will be more deserving of your time.

I have to highlight my friends in the NHS-R community, who had a panel discussion.

Chris Beeley’s cat got a lot of attention during that. I don’t think it featured quite so prominently in his later Shiny talk but you can check it out yourself and confirm.

Wrapping up

Would I do it again? Definitely, if they’ll have me back.

What would I do differently? Well, make a start on the presentation earlier I guess, which might have given me a better chance of recording it.

Should you apply next year? Absolutely.

Thanks to all those who were involved in organising this event.

Huge thanks to my sister for letting me retreat to a peaceful house to do my presentation 🙂

My slides are also available here