It is finished. As mentioned elsewhere, I gave my final conference presentation at Rails World 2024 in Toronto back in September.
The tremendous organizers did me a solid by humoring my request to provide the audio and video feeds they recorded of my talk, which allowed me to create my own edit in the same basic style I've used since discovering screen recording. You can view it on YouTube if you want.
Why watch this one when the official video is also on YouTube? Well, here's what the very exclusive and deluxe and never-before-seen Searls Cut gets you:
- No obstruction, hiding, or movement of the slides themselves—they're the star of the show, not me
- Myself off to the side (where I belong), manually center-tracked with minimal movements to keep me in frame
- Composed in 4K, with slides upscaled to ~1440p
- Same great audio track. I kept in all the umm's and uhh's to humanize me and also because I'm too lazy to bother fixing them
- Native software capture of my slides using Screenflow (as opposed to the conference's HDMI capture)
- Manual removal of the dreaded macOS green dot
- Gently-blurred wide-angle shot as the background instead of cutting between the two video feeds
- Correction of a slide transition where I missed a click on the remote (you can guess, but I'll never tell you which one)
Anyway, if you haven't seen the talk yet, I hope you'll give it a watch. The presentation summarizes a year of my work but it also embeds countless little things life taught me over the 15 years since I started speaking at user groups and regional conferences.
But this chapter of my life has now concluded. I'm excited to be moving on to other things. In the meantime, you can stay tuned to my podcast and subscribe to my newsletter while I get to work.