Last month, I gave my first conference talk ever, titled “UX Design and Education for Effective Monitoring Tools,” at TechSummit Berlin. I felt terrible about it. All I could say about it was that it was over and I didn’t make any glaring mistakes, but something felt hollow about the whole thing. I realized that it was because I couldn’t say honestly to myself that I had expressed what I really wanted to say when I wrote the abstract. The good news is that I gave a talk at Monitorama with the same title and abstract, and I feel like I made a bit more progress towards saying what I needed to say. I wanted to write down some of my thoughts on what changed between the two talks.

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