Last week, we had a Lightning Talks event in HolidayCheck. As I previously wrote about the topic, a lightning talk is an informal, short presentation where anyone can speak according to a theme. The event was important for me on two aspects.

First of all, it was my first talk after a reasonably long time. Also, all my previous public speeches were in Turkish. That was not the only challenge, I was planning to present some introduction about WebRTC, meanwhile the audience consisted of people with different backgrounds, not necessarily tech. So, I needed to make the topic easier to digest.

Secondly, I was also responsible for the organization of this event. It was spring of 2013, when I organized anything for the last time. Of course, it was hard to organize an event on three different locations, but, people at HolidayCheck helped me to overcome any difficulty.

When I announced ten available slots for presentations, I didn’t expect people to take all the slots. It was the first time we organize this event, so I thought people would be interested in speaking follow up events instead of this one, ten is a brave number for the first time. But, Holidaycheck surprised me again, everyone was excited with the idea and everyone was willing to share. We had ten completely different presentations, from “How to make an incredibly tasty and easy snack for your next party – with just 4 ingredients!” to “Beginning with Machine Learning”.

HolidayCheck is a remote first company, even the event initiated from Munich, we had two presentations from Bottighofen and five from Poznan. It’s inspiring to see that people at HolidayCheck are enthusiastic about sharing, practicing and socializing.