I joined Jamf as a training instructor in March of 2022. It was a strange move for me. Prior to that, I was a mostly lone-wolf Jamf Pro admin, enjoying my days in relative solitude with a CodeRunner window and my ticket queue open, communicating mostly by typing words into a document or a chat window. When I did have to hook my laptop into a projector or share a screen during an online meeting, the majority of the time I was meeting with colleagues that I knew well already. For an introvert, not really too big of a lift, I think.
So jumping into a job role where I would not only be speaking, but managing a class full of a dozen different people, mostly not-colleagues, but customers, nearly every week for four days straight, was as you can maybe imagine, a bit of a shock to the system. There were a lot of lessons I had to learn very quickly, and some new problems to try and solve, though most of them are rather specific to this job I know few readers share. But there are a few I think are broadly applicable to anyone, collected here as Section 1 of a course on Technical Presentations for the Introverted.
Lesson 1: Build In Safeguards
While the sort of “presentation” I present during class is probably unlike anything most readers of this blog are going to be doing, I’ve had to figure out a lot of solutions and finesse that I will carry with me the rest of my career. Some of these solutions you might find helpful too.
Depending on the class, I might need to present from, display, or show information from a mobile device, a test computer, a slide deck, and occasionally another computer running Linux for some demos I do in the Jamf 370. I also tend to have a lot of windows open: notes, the course workbook, occasionally the course’s exam too, the course record, a few scripts, probably a terminal window or two, a chat app, email client, and of course, Zoom itself, the app we use to deliver training courses.
Some of this needs to be visible to the students, and some of it must absolutely not be.
And I might have been in a similar situation long before I was a trainer, or at least seen it, where someone has had their laptop plugged into a lectern or a projector in a conference room, when a very poorly timed email or chat notification pops up on screen, helpfully letting everyone know that your co-worker just sent you a message joking about how ugly someone’s sweater is. Or you see a flash of a window containing private information before the presenter is frantically able to minimize or hide it.
I…prefer not to fall victim to this sort of thing. I know from experience that if I rely just on “being extra careful” to not make a mistake, I will inevitably end up making a mistake, as humans are apt to do. So early on as a trainer I set out on a long and complex road to figure out a way to create a few layers of safety for myself and my students. The solution I fell to was a program called OBS. OBS is a free and open-source application that lets you stream, record, and present any video, audio, or photo content you can feed into it. It’s also extensible with a good number of free plugins and filters, so really the sky is the limit for the kinds of content you can ingest or create with it.
Primarily though, it creates the firewall for “presentable” information, and private information, by allowing me to save choices of what I’m going to share, before I need to actually share them live. Setup a few scenes, not under any pressure, so that when I am under pressure, it’s already done. The class only ever sees a feed from the OBS virtual camera extension installed on my production computer, so if it isn’t preconfigured to feed into OBS, it just cannot be shown or shared. Cutting the feed if I need to is force quitting OBS, not fumbling for a tiny or invisible “stop share” button.
As I split the work of teaching between my test computer and my production computer, I also use that machine boundary as a firewall too. Privileged or private information on the production computer, things I intend for students to see on the test computer.
This strategy also works perfectly fine for those moments at a lectern, podium, or when you’re hooking into a projector in a conference room somewhere at your organization (though rehearsal of the more complex transitions and timings might be in order). Instead of mirroring the display, use it as extended. OBS can show a full screen “projector” of its output on a specific display, so run OBS, and arrange the extended display such that it is impossible to accidentally move a csv full of private information onto it, and know that nothing not routed through OBS is likely to ever end up being presented.
Now that I have things setup the way I like, I never share or record without it at work or at home. It lets me spend that “be extra careful” energy on things I cannot safely firewall or partition rather than on small things like “can I open this file right now”.
Lesson 2: Always Have a Backup Plan
If you read all of the previous section and thought, “Wow Bill, that sure does sound complex, what happens when it all falls apart?” Well…good question.
So, the second big lesson I had to learn was: always have a backup plan. I don’t mean that just for the different links in my AV chain, but for everything. Demos. Applications. Scripts. Anything that is “load bearing” for a class, I always try to have a backup ready to go, or at the very least, know exactly how I’ll pivot to an alternative in case something happens.
As I mentioned in the last lesson, I used to actually capture my test computer’s display on a completely separate computer on the other side of the room. It had an HDMI capture card plugged in over PCIe, and I had a 50ft optical HDMI cable to get the video over there, which came back to OBS running on my production computer over the network. That cable still sits on my desk, just in case. The entire setup is still more or less there, for when my USB HDMI capture box fails or flakes out or my local OBS just doesn’t want to pick it up anymore. If that doesn’t work, I have Zoom installed on my test computer, with the Screen Recording permissions already set in System Settings, so worst case I fire up a whole computer screen share on that computer. All of these options only take a few moments to switch to.
But it also goes for things I talk about when I lecture too. Oftentimes in class, things like application behaviors, UIs, buttons, command-line tool syntax, etc., can change from week to week, or at the very least every autumn when Apple releases new operating systems. On occasion, parts of the workbooks I teach from will have changed and I missed the memo, and I find out live in class with a “wait, that’s different than it was last time.” Panic can set in if you’re not mentally ready to jump to something else.
Even having a barely rehearsed backup, even the vaguest idea of “maybe I could do this”, increases your odds of overall success. Anything is better odds than "zero", after all. Perhaps the other demos or choices are less reliable than something you practiced or rehearsed a lot, but still better than “my demo failed, oh no” or a bunch of dead air as you try to troubleshoot live, ears getting redder by the second.
So, when you’re giving that big presentation to the department director, or demoing something live at your first conference, it never hurts to have a backup plan. Demos fail sometimes, and no one will remember if you just smoothly switch over to a backup recording that you had on deck, or if a sudden change to UI or feature-sets makes your demo useless, but you happened to have a program installed that lets you show it an alternative way. Sometimes, the backup plan can just be “move on”! A little bit goes a long way here.
Lesson 3: Follow the Rabbit Hole
In Jamf Training courses, we always open the week with an “Ice Breaker”, and one of the questions posed to the entire class is “What are you looking forward to learning in this course?”. I answer the same way every week: someone will ask me a question at some point during the week that I haven’t ever been asked before, and I’ll get to learn something I wouldn’t have otherwise.
One of my other greatest fears when I first started teaching training courses was failing to meet what is probably an expectation I put onto myself more than anything, but it was a fear of appearing…for lack of a better word, stupid; having a student ask a question, and not knowing the answer, despite it being an answer I feel I should know.
The lesson I learned was that I should frame “questions you don’t have an answer to” as “questions you don’t have an answer to, yet”. Every question I am asked that I don’t have an answer for yet is a question I will have an answer for once I go and find it. This is especially true for the types of questions that stem from what was for me, an unknown unknown. As a trainer, the issues, head-scratchers, and problems that I need to try and solve are very different than they were when I was working in IT as a systems administrator. Even thinking to ask some kinds of questions relies on context and exposure that I simply don’t have anymore, so getting questions about things I would have never asked myself can be eye-opening. This framing trick makes what used to be a thing I was dreading as a new instructor into something I look forward to, something exciting.
And more often than not, even if I dig down a rabbit hole, trying to find an answer, and ultimately don’t find a satisfying one, along the way, I’ll have found some other interesting gem, a hint for a previous question I never found a good answer to, or a lead on some puzzle I’ve been trying to solve or branching path that might be interesting too. There is always value in searching for an answer, it’s just hard to quantify, and sometimes the reward is much delayed, but always worth it.
Section Review
I do have one more lesson I’ve learned as Jamf Trainer that I’ll share. This might surprise some, but stage fright still comes quite naturally to me. I’ll be frank; when I presented at JNUC 2024, my hands shook a tiny bit as I walked into the room. I had a pit in my stomach as deep as the Marianas Trench. I felt the same way before the first Jamf 200 I ever taught, same as the first Jamf 300, the first 400, 370, 270. If I am teaching a class for the first time in a long while, even if it’s a class I know like the back of my hand, that feeling is there, maybe not as strong, but still present. What if I make a mistake? What if I look the fool? What if I say something wrong? I think I’m just wired that way, so I doubt it will ever really change.
I don’t know if I can really teach you this lesson, or if it is one of those that you just have to practice and live through a few dozen times, but I can promise that if you suffer from this sort of stage fright like I do, it gets better. It used to be that I would be figuratively holding my breath until whatever I was presenting was all over. Now, it’s in the first minute, if at all. The feeling is still there, but muted, quiet, and disappears as soon as it’s showtime. Unfortunately, the only way to probably learn this lesson is to just…present. Get up in front of the room. Talk for hours with a slide deck and a test computer hooked up to a projector. Make mistakes. Recover. Make some more mistakes. Tell a lame joke on purpose. And if it makes it easier to do, maybe add in some slick audio/visual effects live, have a couple of other demos or plans for failure in your back pocket, and don’t be afraid of not knowing something because it’s just a learning opportunity in disguise. That’s what has helped me, and I hope it can help you.
