Hello Folks!

Hope you are doing well during this quarantine and make sure you stay indoors. So apparently Quarantine is a big boredom to a lot of people. But according to me, it’s a very good time to learn new skills, work on your hobbies, spend time with family and whatnot.

Dumbledore rightly said:

“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of Times”

The Opportunity

Amidst this, I came to know about this exciting event called Hack Quarantine. It’s a people-focused hackathon bringing people together to use their skills to help combat the issues the world is facing with the COVID-19 pandemic — and it was completely digital. It was very good to see such initiatives being carried out which help to improve one’s skills.

Firstly, I would like to congratulate the entire team of Hack Quarantine for hosting such a great event in a very short span of time. It had both the flavour of uniqueness as well as innovation and being conducted on a digital platform, it provided a great extent to its essence.

Initially, when I heard about Hack Quarantine (HQ), I went through their amazing website and came to know they are accepting CFP as well. I always wanted to give a remote talk and looked at this as an opportunity and applied.

I proposed my lightning talk on Flutter. Currently, I am exploring it and thought — why not address people about it too!

The Recording Process

I decided to pre-record my talk and be available on the live stream for Q&A. The decision of pre-recording made me realise one thing for sure: recording and editing is not an easy job. But to be honest, I loved doing it. It was a bit tricky but it had its fun. Sometimes listening to your voice has its fun. It helped me develop confidence as well!

After many retakes and basic editing, I ended up making the final video of my session.

Talk Content

I covered topics like What is Flutter, its functionalities, and a hands-on session. I also tried to cover the basics of Flutter like Widgets, Stateless and Stateful, etc. I stated a few important links as well so that beginners can get a proper walkthrough of the topic.

In the hands-on session, I showed how to create an app suggesting names and an infinite scroll. I used the following package for the English words:

1

import 'package:english_words/english_words.dart';

It suggested different names generated every time one scrolls down with a set of English words. Pretty interesting!

The Live Event

On April 27, my session was live on Twitch and for me, it was a great experience. I got a few questions as well. It was very good to see a lot of folks had shown up and I hope it helped them.

Tips for Remote Talks

Here are a few tips that I learnt which helped me:

  1. Make a list of topics you want to cover.
  2. Note down necessary links and references.
  3. Just go through areas of a topic once before recording — it might help to avoid chances of retakes!
  4. Just be yourself while delivering your session.
  5. If you are using some stuff from the Internet, it’s better to give credits to it.
  6. Provide links to your slides/code.

Also, want to add that team HQ had been very supportive throughout the event. Kudos to them!

Conclusion

This experience brought me a lot of new ideas and improvements. Team HQ has uploaded my session on their YouTube channel — you can find it here.

Thank you very much and make sure you take care of yourselves and everyone else. I’ll see you around!