1. do not show a slide full of code. The font will be too small to read. Nobody will read it
2. don't read your slides to the audience. The audience can read
3. don't talk with your back to the audience
4. make your font as big as practical
5. 3 bullet points is ideal
6. add a picture now and then
7. don't bother with a copyright notice on every slide. It gets really old. Besides, you want people to steal your presentation!
8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type
9. render the presentation as a pdf file, so any device can display it
10. email a copy of your presentation to the conference coordinator beforehand, put a copy on your laptop, and phone, and on a usb stick in your pocket. Arriving at the show without your presentation can be very embarrassing!
11. the anxiety goes away
12. don't worry about it. You're not running for President! Just have some fun with it
13. Have a message you're actually enthusiastic to tell people.
The audience can quickly tell if someone is there because they want to talk about the topic they're presenting, and having a receptive audience makes it much easier to get on stage to talk about it. If the audience knows you're there because you want another line on your resume or because you're trying to sell them something the atmosphere can turn quite cold and that is a world of pain for a speaker.
It is genuinely shocking how true this is. Also, it's not a gradual thing. I used to be very nervous about public speaking. I did it a lot and one day it just stops. Very sudden, very unexpected.
#8 - If someone absolutely insists on a demonstration and otherwise has to "do it live" this makes you look like a god on stage - https://github.com/sloria/doitlive
Basically just schedules whatever code you want to run so when you invoke the script it will step through whatever you want to run no matter the keystroke you make. No mistakes!
> 8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type
This can absolutely be made to work very well. When Josh Long did this at Goto, it was an absolute masterclass. He used timed zooms to almost turn it into comedy. The rehearsal involved must have been considerable.
> 9. render the presentation as a pdf file, so any device can display it
That's good as a backup, or for simpler presentations (in a good way!) but Powerpoint allows you all kinds of benefits like animations or transitions. Presnting PDFs is not guaranteed to be pain free as well, as I expereince on my corporate controlled laptop with stange versions of Adobe software.
> 11. the anxiety goes away
It does! also remember that the audience doesn't know what you are going to present, so they wouldn't care if you make mistakes.
I will add
13. Practice and learn speaking, a good start could be Vinh Giang's Youtube channel
> Powerpoint allows you all kinds of [things] like animations or transitions
Those are not benefits. Do not do those things. Anything more complicated than embedding a video is a distraction and will not help your presentation. (And the video can be done by alt-tab to VLC or linking YouTube or ... .)
Seriously, trust me on this one.
I have seen a lot of presentations in my day, from sales engineers trying to sell me on things to literally hundreds of guest speakers from all over the world back when I was in grad school. That last one was especially valuable, because I got exposed to a huge variety of speakers and styles, not just a monoculture from one place or company.
And the best of them either never used that crap, or it passed through my brain leaving so little evidence of its existence that it may well never have been there to begin with. I only remember the bad associated with that stuff: a speaker once had to answer a question, went back a couple of slides (fine so far), then had to wait fifteen seconds or so for his dumb, contentless transitions to play out, each slide he advanced, trying to get back to the slide he wanted to be on. Stuff like that is all that's in my head when I think of transitions and animations. The best speakers really do just never bother with it in the first place.
>The best speakers really do just never bother with it in the first place.
This person has a preference which is not universal despite them stating it like a universal truth. I have also watched hundreds of presentations (and presented dozens), so I'm at least as equally qualified to say:
A fade between slides, fading-in bullet points or a picture on a slide as they become relevant, underlining/bolding/changing the color of a word to draw emphasis to it after the fact, etc. All of these can be perfectly fine. In fact, I think these small details can turn an okay slide deck into a well polished one.
>[...] had to wait fifteen seconds or so for his dumb, contentless transitions to play out, each slide he advanced, [...]
But yes, don't make your transitions 15 seconds. And if you're going backwards or skipping ahead, you can skip animations. You don't need to let it play out.
Also important to keep in mind that a good (or bad) slide deck alone does not make a good (or bad) presentation. The speaker and their knowledge + passion for the topic is what is important. A good slide deck is just a bonus.
I agree with that. I do experiment with different slide styles and may use a quick fade-out/in but I don't use Powerpoint any longer and keep things pretty simple. Sometimes slides are more graphically heavy than other times. But rarely use much of the Powerpointish slide chrome. And I'm not really a designer and will mostly mess things up if I try to get too cute.
Instead of making animations to do bolding/underlining, simply copy the slide and then bold/underline it. It will look like an animation, but it isn't, it's just the next slide.
> Those are not benefits. Do not do those things. Anything more complicated than embedding a video is a distraction and will not help your presentation.
> Seriously, trust me on this one.
No, that's your opinion. The best presentations I've seen use animations. Just not on every slide, and not huge distracting animations. Animations can be amazing to emphasize what you're explaining.
DO use animations, just make sure they bring something on the table.
> Powerpoint allows you all kinds of benefits like animations or transitions
I know. I just go for very basic stuff - large fonts, black text on white background, no border, no colors. I ruthlessly eliminate everything but the point I'm trying to make.
Generally, I'm fully on board with the "eliminate everything but the point" philosophy, but transitions can be really useful for displaying that the same element is present in multiple slides. I've had a few cases where I've shown a "before" diagram/code sample/whatever, then on the next slide shown the same diagram again, alongside an "after" version. But the layout I use to put two diagrams on the screen is going to look different to the layout I use for just one, which means the original diagram is going to jump around suddenly.
A ~100ms transition where the first diagram moves from its place on the first slide to its place on the second slide ensures that a person looking at the slide understands very intuitively which of the two diagrams is the original, and which one has been added. It's not perfect (e.g. you'll miss it if you're not looking at the slides at the time), but for diagrams or code samples you generally want the audience to be focussing on the slides, so it typically works well. And in 90% of cases, even if you do miss it, it'll be obvious after a couple of moments' thought what's going on, but the transition saves you those couple of moments.
I could just show both items on the first slide, but I find it's often pedagogically useful to explore the initial state by itself, rather than jumping straight in with the comparison. That way you can motivate the comparison more clearly by identifying the issues with the initial state (be that a code sample, a diagram, whatever), before moving on to the comparison with a potential solution.
If it weren't for this one use-case, I'd probably also switch to PDFs, because I've been bitten by presentational issues before that would have been a lot easier to solve if the presentation had just been available as a PDF.
> 8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type
As usual, thumb rules exist to protect you until you can confidently break them. One of the coolest presentations I've seen was several years ago at a React conference where the speaker live coded an electronic music and light show using React. They were demonstrating how "components" could really render anything.
Another one I've seen was someone live coding (well, doing some small code changes to an existing codebase, compiling, uploading) a program that controls a drone and made it perform a couple of tricks on stage.
Live demos do work, it's all about pace, preparation, and fallback plans.
Not "do not show code". Focused snippets are fine, you just need to distill the code to make sure it's just the essence of what you want to show and that it's easy to read (naming is important).
4-5 lines can be really effective. After all, if you're at a software conference, you're probably speaking to a bunch of programmers about programming, and code is your universal language.
But already 7-10 lines is stretching it, and any more than that, and it's a lot harder to get your point across because people spend so much time trying to parse the code sample.
The problem is that cutting down the code and coming up with an example that explains everything you want in just 4-5 lines is really hard — "if I had more time, I'd have written a shorter letter" and all that.
I ruthlessly make the code examples as simple as possible. Eliminate everything but the point you're trying to make. I'll adjust the font to fill the slide.
And it doesn't have to even be code that compiles, unless it's about the language design and it really really matters for that presentation. You can yadda yadda whatever you want. Syntax doesn't exist anymore, just use greyed out "..." for the uninteresting parts.
Just do it. There's nothing wrong with it, if that's the kind of talk you want to give.
Look at stuff by david beazley, matt godbolt or casey muratori. They all have talks which focus on small pieces of code and i'm sure it's a tremendous effort to frame that well enough and pace it appropriately, but it sure works for them (and me watching their talks).
Tell a story. It might be "unrelated" to thd topic at hand (I based one on Shackleton's expedition, and another on a Robert Frost poem (two roads diverged.) Or it might be related, a "my journey" type, or it might be about the experience seen through the eyes of a customer. But a story helps the audience relate, and keeps a thread through it all.
If you can, be funny. Frankly this is hard if you're not a 'funny' person. Delivering a good joke, or line, well can be learned but if it's not your thing steer clear. Bad funny is worse than not funny.
If you're not funny naturally then get a funny person to help you script in "dry" humor lines. You can deliver them dry, in fact often the dryer the better.
"We founded our business in Jan 2020. Nothing could possibly go wrong".
But good funny is great. Learning while laughing really keeps the audience engaged.
Reacting to the audience engagement is also a skill worth developing. When they're bored, move on. When they hiss or boo or laugh or leave, these are all valuable feedback.
Enjoy yourself. If you're having fun, they will too.
Oh, one more thing. Keep on hand some of your previous presentations. Often, a speaker won't show up and the conference organizer is panicking and needs a replacement. Be first to volunteer your services! I've done that several times, and the results were always worthwhile.
One time, I didn't have an extra talk with me, but I volunteered anyway and asked for a whiteboard and markers. Frankly, it was the best talk I ever gave. Unfortunately, it wasn't recorded. But it sure was fun! (I simply asked the audience what they wanted me to talk about.)
I once got a panicked email from a conference organizer in Japan at about 3AM because a speaker was at another event and completely forgotten about this one. (Hey! Happens.) I was able to be like, no problem. Here's a presentation that works.
And, if need be, I could have just done something on the fly instead.
1. All tech discussion is irrelevant unless it’s leetcode. Don’t fill my brain with any other useless, unproductive information.
2. How much time (points) will this presentation take to get to prod. Then how many points (time) will it take to deploy to prod. Do we need a spike for this presentation. I’m going to put it in the backlog and close it out since we’ll never get to it.
> Finally, watch out for events that put video of their sessions online. Having a couple of YouTube links of you doing your thing in front of a live, appreciate audience can make all the difference when a programme committee is looking at a handful of talks and can only accept one of them.
This, very much this.
I run a paid, one-day, mid-sized conference every year, and with only so many slots, we find it very, very difficult to risk choosing people who don't have videos of themselves speaking.
A short meetup talk or a lightning talk at a different conference could make all the difference towards being selected, because we need to know that you're vaguely capable of conveying what you want to share to the audience.
My professionally produced video is a bit old though I have others recorded on a webcam. I don't know how often they're looked at (and I know a lot of people on the conference committees) but it's certainly useful to have at least something.
I don't want videos of me online. Would an audio recording + slides suffice in your opinion? Or would you doubt it was really live in front of a sufficiently large audience? Idk how common fraud here would be
I feel like if you don't want videos (and I assume photos) of you online then speaking at a conference is probably not the aligned action to pursue that goal
Not sure if culture is different at other conferences but the ones I've been to had talk status recorded or not recorded. Requesting that pictures of you aren't shared online seems to be a common enough request
If you're the sort of private person who doesn't want a big online presence - why bother to speak at a software conference? Especially a conference big enough they're selective about who they allow to present?
About 90% of speakers at big events are there to promote their product, or to get their company's name out there for recruitment purposes, or to promote their consultancy, or to build their personal brand. If you don't give a shit about any of that stuff, maybe you don't need to bother?
I'd probably put it more diplomatically. But if you're speaking at a conference, there may be video, audio, and photographs which may be posted online and may be part of the terms you sign up for when you register. If any of that bothers you, you may not want to speak.
This is just my personal opinion, but your expertise in your proposed topic would have to be really good (i.e. you've written a few blog posts about it) for a conference to overlook this.
Recorded videos act as a portfolio for both potential speakers and conferences alike. I think some first-time attendees rely on past videos to determine whether a conference is worth going for.
(That said, we've set videos as unlisted for people who think that they've bombed their talks before — think leaving the stage in tears because the Q&A was harsh — but that's just goodwill.)
I don't know how often recorded videos are viewed--conference committees have to wade through a lot of applications.
But conference presentations are basically public events and if that bothers you, you should probably reconsider doing one. (Yes, per parent, if there's a real disaster--and those happen--they may be deep-sixed but I wouldn't count on it.)
How common is that (outside of academia maybe -- which I have little familiarity with)?
Certainly when I've been on conference committees we tended to know a lot of the presenters and wouldn't have wanted to just rely on submissions. We knew who were experts on specific topics or were just good presenters.
Personally I would find a video that's slides with audio just as compelling as a video where the speaker was visible in terms of helping me understand if that person could give a competent presentation or not.
I imagine it'll go against your talk getting into the shortlist.
But there are some conferences that ask and respect your preference whether you'd like the video recording to have your face or just the audio. But I have yet to see a conference that go as far as asking the audience to not take photos of the presenter, so it's pretty much moot if you do not want your photos published at all.
>
I run a paid, one-day, mid-sized conference every year, and with only so many slots, we find it very, very difficult to risk choosing people who don't have videos of themselves speaking.
Some people are much more privacy-conscious than others and thus at least don't want more videos of themselves online than what is absolutely necessary.
Speak at your local meetup, and record yourself doing so if the meetup doesn't record the talks!
Meetups often have trouble finding speakers (well, many of the non-AI ones here do), so it's a win-win for both the meetup organisers and the budding conference speaker.
Another way to get your name out there is to speak at free (/low-cost), multi-track conferences like FOSDEM. Free conferences tend to be more receptive of first-time speakers because attendees didn't pay hundreds of dollars for their tickets.
(If you are an up-and-coming speaker, please don't let my comment discourage you from submitting their proposals to larger conferences. Some conferences have the resources and willing alumni to run speaker mentorship programs.)
Local meetups are very easy to get selected into, and they often have two or three speakers lined up, with a balance of speakers they know and are experienced, and new speakers.
Most of the time, the organizers are squeezed to find a speaker, so you are pretty much guaranteed to be offered a slot if you just ask the host.
The conference typically does it anyway, and otherwise you can ask a friend in the audience, or make a new friend who's willing to, or put a tiny tripod somewhere with your phone in camera-from-lockscreen mode. The point is showing that you can present on stage, so audio is most important I'd assume. It doesn't have to be amazing quality/angle
Public speaking plus blog posts did more for my career than my advanced engineering degrees. They lead to my past three places of employment. I did a talk or wrote a blog post, posted it to LI and then the decision makers reached out to me. This got me employment at workplaces I loved. I only write/ talk about things I enjoy, and they needed people with skills in the topics I wrote/ talk about. Perfect fit. I highly recommend this approach.
He's pretty right on the "get bored" bits. I have few friends that are doing a lot of conferences every year after, say, year 6, and they are people whose circumstances lead them to not wanting to spend much time at home, for one reason or another. At that point it's like a job with 30% travel: You either have few attachments, or are trying to avoid the ones you have.
I had a coworker in Seattle who commuted from the far side of Steven’s pass every day. That was a 2 hour trip each way. I desperately wanted to know what was up with her home life.
Some introverts can use a long solo car trip to wind themselves up to deal with people or decompress afterward so they don’t take it out on their family. Others find it all too stressful and just makes it worse. But that’s like 20 minutes for me. I can’t imagine two hours. We didn’t drive that long to get to grandma’s house.
I had about a 90 minute commute (by train or car/subway) at one point--about half the time because I did a lot of traveling. But couldn't have handled that long-term. Latterly, I had about a 2 hour commute into a city office--but rarely.
> people whose circumstances lead them to not wanting to spend much time at home, for one reason or another. At that point it's like a job with 30% travel: You either have few attachments, or are trying to avoid the ones you have.
Or a couple loves to travel and conferences are a good excuse.
In semi-retirement, I very selectively pick a few conferences to travel to in locations I want to be, at appropriate times of year, in interesting venues. Definitely less than I used to do.
One minor tangent (aiming for helpfulness, not pedantry), "I have few" reads as "I don't have many" (emphasizes the low number), whereas "I have a few" emphasizes the fact there's more than one -- which from context was clearly your intent. HTH!
I've given many talks at conferences, meetups, and otherwise. My number one piece of advice is to /really/ know your subject. Sometimes I am asked to present something I don't already intimately know, and it can be tempting to put together a presentation and learn just enough to present, but it's MUCH better to really go deep and learn the subject fully. Why?
1. Competence creates confidence, and confidence creates trust.
2. You can answer questions, pretty much any question, and if you can't you can let the audience know graciously without coming off as unknowledgable.
3. It makes it easier to present well, because you don't need to or are not tempted to read from the slides, you're telling a story or sharing information in a natural way, off the dome, using the slides only as a topic guide because you already fully understand everything about the subject.
I have found this to be so important, that I sometimes /choose/ to present something I'm interested in but don't know well (with enough lead time) as a jumping off point to dig deep into it. I have long believed if you want to really understand something, the benchmark for having achieved competence is successfully teaching that subject to another person and seeing them succeed with it.
This is a great list. As someone who has spoken at hundreds of conferences, there's one piece of advise I give younger speakers, particularly those nervous about how the audience will receive them. Dylan alludes to this in a different context
> Finally: respect your audience. Whether you’re talking to five people at a meetup, fifty at a community event, or five thousand at a huge international conference: those people are the reason you get to do this. They have given up their time - and often a substantial amount of money - to hear what you have to say. They deserve your best shot, every time
This is the same thing I say except, them _choosing_ to attend your talk, and opting in to giving you their time and attention is a signal that they _want_ you to succeed. They are HOPING you deliver your message, and that your demos all work, and that you conclude well. If kept in mind, I believe this can help alleviate some of the anxiety.
Sidebar: I've done this for a very long time and I still get nervous at the beginning of every talk. And I will be the first to admit—you WILL run into the occasional show off in the audience who is intent on demonstrating to you (and to the rest of room) how much smarter or more experienced they are than the speaker. That will happen—but it's an aberration.
Fellow speaker, and a large part of my "speaking with confidence" breakthrough was realizing this point exactly.
The other key unlock for me was the realization that I was the ONLY one in the entire room who would know when I fumbled a word or didn't deliver the content on each slide absolutely perfectly.
This year I spoke at HOPE - Hackers On Planet Earth. The topic was "Hacking ATMs: past and present". I really enjoyed it, it took a lot to prepare though. I haven't gotten any monetary benefit from it, but I would definitely do it again.
HOPE is one of the best hacker conferences, and it's somehow [subjectively] friendlier than other. Feels like home, so if you're on hacker news, I guess you wanna speak at hacker conference or contribute to 2600? ^_^
I’ve been doing public speaking for my entire adult life, but not for a living.
That said, it’s not my strong suit. Others are far better at it than I am.
This is one of those areas where folks can make money/satisfy ego, so there’s a ton of competition. I’m not competitive, and am not interested in making money doing this kind of thing, so I don’t really try.
I do appreciate folks that are good at it, though; especially when I want to learn. A skilled orator can make learning a lot more fun, and can be very motivating.
I’m comfortable doing it, and generally receive positive responses, but I’m not “a natural.”
If I have something that I need to “get just right,” like a class or main speaker gig, I have to practice a lot, and can come across as a bit “stiff.” If I don’t practice, I do well, but not predictably so, which makes me a bit of a “wildcard.”
I know quite a few folks that can walk up to a podium, in front of hundreds of people, at little notice, and knock it out of the park. They often practice.
Steve Jobs was one of the best public speakers I ever heard, and I’m told that he used to practice for hours. I knew a woman (I’m friends with her ex) that used to regularly appear on TV, and keynote finance conferences. She has an “aw shucks,” casual style. Her (ex) husband told me that she’d practice before each gig for many hours.
The folks that make it seem to be “natural,” at anything, generally practice a lot. I speak frequently, but it’s not structured practice.
I suppose it's a combination, some people are more comfortable speaking and improvising on the spot but everyone needs to practice. I can add to your list a CEO of a big bank, he speaks freely and it's a pleasent to listen to him, but I heard that he practice using a private instructor as well
That's insightful! Thanks for sharing.
I've been applying to conferences recently to present an open-source library I built (a unified client for AI providers), but I haven't gotten any responses yet.
I think the project is solid—it basically lets you switch from OpenAI to Anthropic in one line of code—but I suspect my CFP (Call for Papers) abstracts are failing to hook the organizers.
For those here who review CFPs: Do you prefer abstracts that focus on the "Technical How-To" (e.g., 'How to standardize I/O layers') or the "Story/Philosophy" (e.g., 'Why we need primitives, not frameworks')? I feel like I might be getting too technical too fast.
I like the general idea, and I owe so much for the talks and bloposts. That said, I really miss the old deep boring technical talks with speakers with an attitude of "I do not care if you meet the tecnical (and probably cognitive in some several cases) requirements to be in this room".
I used to go in talks in the late 2000s and the difference with talks now in the mid-2020s is that the speakers now are so good and well-crafted, the slides way more professional, and the storytelling is so compelling, and... that's the issue(?) for me.
The strange loop maybe was the last bastion of tech conference where I could check in those kinds if speakers.
There are so many aspects of topic accessibility and formatting that some of the open-ended parts of a technical argument or some not-said parts are not in the presentations anymore.
Beforehand I used to go to some talks and literally take notes on 90% of the things, and back home I started to do some research about it, and eventually I learned 70% of it, and I started to have at least 2% that made some difference in my daily work.
Now the talks are so well structured that I do not see most of the time the open-ended unsaid topic that could be an intellectual side quest, given how well the presenter placed it and made it uninteresting for me, or they do not talk about this open-ended aspect at all, and it never sparked my curiosity.
Maybe it's not such a sophisticated analogy, but the old format would be like reading a book and piecing together a lot of not-explicit points from the author, and the other one is like having the same book in a cinematic experience with a well-crafted screenplay, costumes, dialog, and so on.
> The strange loop maybe was the last bastion of tech conference where I could check in those kinds if speakers.
Strange Loop was amazing. The vibes were perfect. And I've never been to another tech conference that I found to be so mind expanding. Most of the talks I'd attend had no practical utility in my daily life, but got me thinking about all sorts of what ifs and if/how I could apply some nugget of what they were saying to more practical applications.
If your presentation requires a custom software installation, give the audience the instructions as a hand out/script so you can focus on the important part.
I once did a breakout about a Geo support in Django, but the presenter spent the entire time helping people install PostgreSQL with geo support for an entire morning. We never ran a single line of Django code when the presentation was over.
I have run a ColdFusion users group in East Lansing for the past twenty five years. I have helped many first time speakers and this is some outstanding advice.
Although I have never done it myself I can also recommend Toastmasters. Seen some speakers soar after attending this group for a year. You wouldn't even think that it was the same person presenting. Having that experience of public speaking can also greatly accelerate your career.
The idea that East Lansing, Michigan, can support a regular gathering of ColdFusion users in 2025 is the most astonishing thing I've learned in quite some time. Consider me quite impressed.
rmason- I love how supportive you are of tech groups in Michigan. I’m trying to organize an Anthropic meetup, and you helped provide some great advice. Your love of tech and community is evident.
I struggled for a long time to figure out what would be "interesting enough" to give a talk about. Turns out that the way that we do different things in Next.js was not talked about enough. Did my first technical talk about some decisions and mechanisms that Next.js uses for dynamic detection and rendering and found a sweet spot.
I just wrote (with some AI help) a recently fast rrb tree implementation for c# [0]. I am waiting for the phone calls, but so far I have gotten nothing in 24h. Maybe if I figure out how to use docfx...
If no one else is aware, Dylan is one of the best conference talkers in the industry. A rare combination of technical knowledge, experience and fantastic to watch if you ever get the chance.
My issue is that the next ladder rung involves going out and doing presentations at conferences and the like. However... I did that 10 years ago, it feels like I'm past that. A lot of things now feel like I've done them 10 years ago. Which makes me think, should I have been earning what I do now back then? It feels the wrong way around.
Sure, it happens. Especially if somebody is already well known and respected in their field.
But it is not common, and I find it frustrating how many people think they can fast-track their way to the bigger events. I've been on the committee that rejects their submissions and find myself having to diplomatically explain to them "you've never done this before, nobody has any idea who you are, you've done nothing to establish your credibility regarding this topic, and you were one of 1500 submissions for 50 available slots... sorry, kid, that's not how this works."
I did not mean to imply that steps could be skipped, just that they can be orchestrated more rapidly in some niches where there are a lot of conferences
>> Write a talk nobody else could do; tell a story nobody else can tell. Figure out what your audience is going to learn, and why you’re the best person to teach them that.
One of the best topics for new speakers is "here's what I learned when I built project X".
Nobody else in the world could give that talk, because they didn't build that project.
It doesn't matter if you're not presenting anything that's ground breaking and new - what's important is that your audience gets to benefit from the same lessons that you learned.
Even if some members of the audience already knew those lessons, hearing a new way of explaining them - with new supporting stories - is still valuable.
The bar is there, but it is lower than you expect. If you have a truly unique point of view to express, that brings some value to the table, slots will open up.
And I've spoken at plenty of conferences. :) Not always in the glamour rooms/slots. But... I did have one talk fill a room out the door. That was a talk on a difficult/controversial topic, and by then... I was probably about as expert as they came on the issue.
I didn't start with that though. I just started with a simple point of view talk. And I'd argue the second version of that talk is still one of the best I've given in my life.
That doesn't mean every talk has to be unique and special. An "introduction to XYZ" talk may have a bunch of equally valid speakers, which all naturally provide a slightly different angle and there is a bunch of factors going in the decision about who gets the slot.
Some talks are plain craftswork, not unique experiences and still very worthwhile.
It can. But I don't want to compete for my slot with others who can give the same talk, or a talk that is similar.
I want to make the conference committee choose between "Do we want ilc's talk on X." or "Do we want foo's talk on Y." If we are both discussing the same thing, if I'm unknown, I will lose. OTOH, if I have something interesting to talk about... I have 2 routes to "victory". "ilc gives great talks, he gets good grades and is working on his skills." and "Man that's a damn cool topic. We want that at our conference, even if ilc isn't the BEST speaker, the combo is better."
I didn't start out as the best presenter. I learned. But I always knew I had to have an interesting topic, something that made it worth them giving me a slot.
I don't think the author meant that you have to be the world leading expert at any topic. You can be pretty average, but you need to give it your personal twist. He is warning against very generic abstract talks that can be replaced by reading a man page.
No, it's about perspective - I know that 'cos I wrote the article, but perhaps it didn't come across very clearly!
Here's the specific problem that advice is intended to remedy, which I have seen happen many, many times:
Somebody writes a talk about, say, what's new in C# 13. It's a solid talk: they've done the research, they've prepared some good demos. At local user groups, it does very well. At regional and community conferences, it does very well.
But it doesn't have any personality. It's not a case study. It's not based on using those features in production, or applying them to a specific domain. The presenter has read all the docs, run all the examples, maybe found an edge case or two, and put together a decent slide deck and some engaging demos - but even if they've done a fantastic job, there are a thousand other tech presenters out there who could do exactly the same thing.
They then start submitting that talk to big conferences which have a .NET track, and it never gets accepted.
Why? Because those conferences have people like Mads Torgersen, the actual lead designer of C# at Microsoft, on speed dial. If NDC Oslo or CraftConf or Yow! wants to fly somebody in to talk about what's new in C#, they can get the person who wrote those docs to do it.
Now, consider that talk was "how I used C# 13 to rebuild my smart home dashboard", or "how my team used C# 13 to save $5000 a month in AWS bills", or "I built an online game server using C# 13". Those kinds of talks do well because they have personality; there's more there than just the technology itself.
That's what I mean by "a story nobody else can tell" - it's a presentation that's anchored in the speaker's own real world experience; detail and context that hitherto only existed in their head.
I run presentation workshops for software professionals, and one of the things I ask my students to do is to come up with something - doesn't have to be tech-related - that they know better than anybody else in the group. We've had folks talk about how to cook ragu, how to surf on a longboard, how to get their kid to fall asleep ("literally nobody else in the world can do this, not even my wife"), and it is always remarkable to me how much more engaging and animated people become when they are telling their own story rather than paraphrasing research.
That's how I read it as well. I think it's wrong because I've learned the most from people one step ahead of me. Experts who are ten steps ahead have the curse of knowledge: it's extra hard to figure out what things make sense to a conference audience. Many presentations go too fast and then too slow two minutes later
Someone who just learned a thing is in the best position to give you the diff to learn it as well. At least, that was my experience running a blog as a teenager. I wrote about cool things I just learned or realised and people found that useful
Edited to add: Also, impostor syndrome. With this as the "first step" advise, you'll select people who are full of themselves and nobody else would give presentations unless their topic is super niche (not useful for most people) or they got lucky to see some big story up close (if you had a front seat during a Github outage, say). The latter is both interesting and fun but it's not the only type of talk I want to see
It's doable if you pick a very focused topic. In my first year of using Julia, I gave a talk on gradually adding Julia to a large Python codebase. Very few people could give a similar talk because (1) Julia is a fairly niche language, (2) most of the people who understood Julia <> Python interop knew it too well, and had forgotten all the common beginner challenges.
It is an extremely high bar if you aim for super popular topics.
You might want to spend time on some niche topic and there might be people who don’t have time to dabble in that topic but would be happy if someone did it for them.
I wouldn't expect that most people couldn't, with enough time and resources, tell a better story. Isn't the part of the point of giving a talk to convey the ideas so that other people can use them? If they've internalized the ideas and seen your presentation, can't they then improve it and give a better talk? Haven't you failed if they can't do that?
Does me being the best person to teach them matter? Doesn't it matter more that I am the person teaching them when no one else is?
There's room for personalization, making sure the talk compliments your style and gives insight into why you think it's important and how you solved it, but none of this really relies on the uniqueness of the person.
If Stallman got up and gave a talk on "what it's like to be me", I would find it much less interesting than a talk about "how to invent free software and build a movement around it".
Stallman can give a talk about "how to invent free software and build a movement around it" because Stallman has invented free software and built a movement around it. For Stallman, there is a significant overlap between "what it's like to be me" and "how to invent free software" - his version of that story is exactly the story nobody else can tell.
It's not about telling a better story. It's about telling a story better.
One tip I've found really useful over the past few years is to always try and include a "STAR moment" in a talk - where STAR stands for "Something They'll Always Remember".
Effectively it means try and have at least one memorable surprise or gimmick in your talk. If someone watches a dozen talks at a conference you want them to be able to say "Oh, I remember your talk, it was the one with ..." when they meet you in the corridor.
> Conferences have n00bs and PMs, not the experts, because they don't need to learn anything anymore.
The real experts never stop learning.
Some of them go to conferences because that's one of the few times in the year they can hang out with each other, and find out what their community is up to.
actually, the primary reason to go to conferences is networking. meeting people, make connections. you go to talks that interest you so you can meet people that share your interest.
same for giving presentations. you give presentations to promote an idea or work, to share something you have learned, to contribute to the community, and again, for networking.
fomo? not at all. personal development? that's a bonus, but not the motivation.
Some things I've learned over the years:
1. do not show a slide full of code. The font will be too small to read. Nobody will read it
2. don't read your slides to the audience. The audience can read
3. don't talk with your back to the audience
4. make your font as big as practical
5. 3 bullet points is ideal
6. add a picture now and then
7. don't bother with a copyright notice on every slide. It gets really old. Besides, you want people to steal your presentation!
8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type
9. render the presentation as a pdf file, so any device can display it
10. email a copy of your presentation to the conference coordinator beforehand, put a copy on your laptop, and phone, and on a usb stick in your pocket. Arriving at the show without your presentation can be very embarrassing!
11. the anxiety goes away
12. don't worry about it. You're not running for President! Just have some fun with it
13. Have a message you're actually enthusiastic to tell people.
The audience can quickly tell if someone is there because they want to talk about the topic they're presenting, and having a receptive audience makes it much easier to get on stage to talk about it. If the audience knows you're there because you want another line on your resume or because you're trying to sell them something the atmosphere can turn quite cold and that is a world of pain for a speaker.
it's physically painful for me to stop talking about my topic
it's physically painful for everyone else to listen to you talking about your topic.. if you talk for too long that is. :)
The (in)famous astronomer Tycho Brahe died from a bladder infection after politeness prevented him leaving the audience on such an occasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe#Illness,_death,_an...
Indeed! It's said that no talk should be longer than a microcentury.
https://www.ams.org/notices/199701/comm-rota.pdf
https://susam.net/microcentury.html
> if you talk for too long that is
I've made that mistake. Talking for longer than 50 minutes is a bad idea.
LOL. I get writers' cramp every time I write a check.
That’s funny because I get dementia every time I have to use my debit card. No matter how many times I think I know where it is, it isn’t there.
> 11. the anxiety goes away
It is genuinely shocking how true this is. Also, it's not a gradual thing. I used to be very nervous about public speaking. I did it a lot and one day it just stops. Very sudden, very unexpected.
I still have it, but it goes away as soon as I start the presentation. Then it just becomes fun!
Yeah, I still get a bit of stage fright especially in a large room but, as you say, it pretty much goes away once I start "performing."
A shot or two of liquid courage doesn’t hurt either. Though beyond that you risk exceeding the Balmer peak.
I don't think I'm alone in finding it quite suspect if people walk around smelling of "liquid courage" in professional settings.
Don't drink coffee before going on stage. At least when you're old like me.
That's not what liquid courage means ;)
(Though that is otherwise good advice!)
#8 - If someone absolutely insists on a demonstration and otherwise has to "do it live" this makes you look like a god on stage - https://github.com/sloria/doitlive
Basically just schedules whatever code you want to run so when you invoke the script it will step through whatever you want to run no matter the keystroke you make. No mistakes!
Yup!
> 8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type
This can absolutely be made to work very well. When Josh Long did this at Goto, it was an absolute masterclass. He used timed zooms to almost turn it into comedy. The rehearsal involved must have been considerable.
Might want to link the talk, he's a rather prolific speaker.
> 9. render the presentation as a pdf file, so any device can display it
That's good as a backup, or for simpler presentations (in a good way!) but Powerpoint allows you all kinds of benefits like animations or transitions. Presnting PDFs is not guaranteed to be pain free as well, as I expereince on my corporate controlled laptop with stange versions of Adobe software.
> 11. the anxiety goes away
It does! also remember that the audience doesn't know what you are going to present, so they wouldn't care if you make mistakes.
I will add
13. Practice and learn speaking, a good start could be Vinh Giang's Youtube channel
> Powerpoint allows you all kinds of [things] like animations or transitions
Those are not benefits. Do not do those things. Anything more complicated than embedding a video is a distraction and will not help your presentation. (And the video can be done by alt-tab to VLC or linking YouTube or ... .)
Seriously, trust me on this one.
I have seen a lot of presentations in my day, from sales engineers trying to sell me on things to literally hundreds of guest speakers from all over the world back when I was in grad school. That last one was especially valuable, because I got exposed to a huge variety of speakers and styles, not just a monoculture from one place or company.
And the best of them either never used that crap, or it passed through my brain leaving so little evidence of its existence that it may well never have been there to begin with. I only remember the bad associated with that stuff: a speaker once had to answer a question, went back a couple of slides (fine so far), then had to wait fifteen seconds or so for his dumb, contentless transitions to play out, each slide he advanced, trying to get back to the slide he wanted to be on. Stuff like that is all that's in my head when I think of transitions and animations. The best speakers really do just never bother with it in the first place.
>Those are not benefits. Do not do those things.
>The best speakers really do just never bother with it in the first place.
This person has a preference which is not universal despite them stating it like a universal truth. I have also watched hundreds of presentations (and presented dozens), so I'm at least as equally qualified to say:
A fade between slides, fading-in bullet points or a picture on a slide as they become relevant, underlining/bolding/changing the color of a word to draw emphasis to it after the fact, etc. All of these can be perfectly fine. In fact, I think these small details can turn an okay slide deck into a well polished one.
>[...] had to wait fifteen seconds or so for his dumb, contentless transitions to play out, each slide he advanced, [...]
But yes, don't make your transitions 15 seconds. And if you're going backwards or skipping ahead, you can skip animations. You don't need to let it play out.
Also important to keep in mind that a good (or bad) slide deck alone does not make a good (or bad) presentation. The speaker and their knowledge + passion for the topic is what is important. A good slide deck is just a bonus.
I agree with that. I do experiment with different slide styles and may use a quick fade-out/in but I don't use Powerpoint any longer and keep things pretty simple. Sometimes slides are more graphically heavy than other times. But rarely use much of the Powerpointish slide chrome. And I'm not really a designer and will mostly mess things up if I try to get too cute.
Instead of making animations to do bolding/underlining, simply copy the slide and then bold/underline it. It will look like an animation, but it isn't, it's just the next slide.
> Those are not benefits. Do not do those things. Anything more complicated than embedding a video is a distraction and will not help your presentation.
> Seriously, trust me on this one.
No, that's your opinion. The best presentations I've seen use animations. Just not on every slide, and not huge distracting animations. Animations can be amazing to emphasize what you're explaining.
DO use animations, just make sure they bring something on the table.
> Powerpoint allows you all kinds of benefits like animations or transitions
I know. I just go for very basic stuff - large fonts, black text on white background, no border, no colors. I ruthlessly eliminate everything but the point I'm trying to make.
Generally, I'm fully on board with the "eliminate everything but the point" philosophy, but transitions can be really useful for displaying that the same element is present in multiple slides. I've had a few cases where I've shown a "before" diagram/code sample/whatever, then on the next slide shown the same diagram again, alongside an "after" version. But the layout I use to put two diagrams on the screen is going to look different to the layout I use for just one, which means the original diagram is going to jump around suddenly.
A ~100ms transition where the first diagram moves from its place on the first slide to its place on the second slide ensures that a person looking at the slide understands very intuitively which of the two diagrams is the original, and which one has been added. It's not perfect (e.g. you'll miss it if you're not looking at the slides at the time), but for diagrams or code samples you generally want the audience to be focussing on the slides, so it typically works well. And in 90% of cases, even if you do miss it, it'll be obvious after a couple of moments' thought what's going on, but the transition saves you those couple of moments.
I could just show both items on the first slide, but I find it's often pedagogically useful to explore the initial state by itself, rather than jumping straight in with the comparison. That way you can motivate the comparison more clearly by identifying the issues with the initial state (be that a code sample, a diagram, whatever), before moving on to the comparison with a potential solution.
If it weren't for this one use-case, I'd probably also switch to PDFs, because I've been bitten by presentational issues before that would have been a lot easier to solve if the presentation had just been available as a PDF.
> 8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type
As usual, thumb rules exist to protect you until you can confidently break them. One of the coolest presentations I've seen was several years ago at a React conference where the speaker live coded an electronic music and light show using React. They were demonstrating how "components" could really render anything.
Another one I've seen was someone live coding (well, doing some small code changes to an existing codebase, compiling, uploading) a program that controls a drone and made it perform a couple of tricks on stage.
Live demos do work, it's all about pace, preparation, and fallback plans.
> As usual, thumb rules exist to protect you until you can confidently break them.
1. novice follows the rules because he's told to
2. master follows the rules because he understands them
3. guru transcends the rules because he knows their limitations
What is the best way to show code?
I really want to show some code. Like 4-5 lines to give a gist.
The advice is:
> 1. do not show a slide full of code.
Not "do not show code". Focused snippets are fine, you just need to distill the code to make sure it's just the essence of what you want to show and that it's easy to read (naming is important).
4-5 lines can be really effective. After all, if you're at a software conference, you're probably speaking to a bunch of programmers about programming, and code is your universal language.
But already 7-10 lines is stretching it, and any more than that, and it's a lot harder to get your point across because people spend so much time trying to parse the code sample.
The problem is that cutting down the code and coming up with an example that explains everything you want in just 4-5 lines is really hard — "if I had more time, I'd have written a shorter letter" and all that.
When I need more than a couple lines of code, I'll highlight in red the parts the audience should focus on.
I ruthlessly make the code examples as simple as possible. Eliminate everything but the point you're trying to make. I'll adjust the font to fill the slide.
And it doesn't have to even be code that compiles, unless it's about the language design and it really really matters for that presentation. You can yadda yadda whatever you want. Syntax doesn't exist anymore, just use greyed out "..." for the uninteresting parts.
Just do it. There's nothing wrong with it, if that's the kind of talk you want to give.
Look at stuff by david beazley, matt godbolt or casey muratori. They all have talks which focus on small pieces of code and i'm sure it's a tremendous effort to frame that well enough and pace it appropriately, but it sure works for them (and me watching their talks).
I agree with these, but David Beazley breaks most of them and his talks are way better than mine ;)
e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r-A78RgMhZU
Above all else, make it interesting and entertaining!
Which should go without saying…
In this line;
Tell a story. It might be "unrelated" to thd topic at hand (I based one on Shackleton's expedition, and another on a Robert Frost poem (two roads diverged.) Or it might be related, a "my journey" type, or it might be about the experience seen through the eyes of a customer. But a story helps the audience relate, and keeps a thread through it all.
If you can, be funny. Frankly this is hard if you're not a 'funny' person. Delivering a good joke, or line, well can be learned but if it's not your thing steer clear. Bad funny is worse than not funny.
If you're not funny naturally then get a funny person to help you script in "dry" humor lines. You can deliver them dry, in fact often the dryer the better.
"We founded our business in Jan 2020. Nothing could possibly go wrong".
But good funny is great. Learning while laughing really keeps the audience engaged.
Reacting to the audience engagement is also a skill worth developing. When they're bored, move on. When they hiss or boo or laugh or leave, these are all valuable feedback.
Enjoy yourself. If you're having fun, they will too.
Oh, one more thing. Keep on hand some of your previous presentations. Often, a speaker won't show up and the conference organizer is panicking and needs a replacement. Be first to volunteer your services! I've done that several times, and the results were always worthwhile.
One time, I didn't have an extra talk with me, but I volunteered anyway and asked for a whiteboard and markers. Frankly, it was the best talk I ever gave. Unfortunately, it wasn't recorded. But it sure was fun! (I simply asked the audience what they wanted me to talk about.)
I once got a panicked email from a conference organizer in Japan at about 3AM because a speaker was at another event and completely forgotten about this one. (Hey! Happens.) I was able to be like, no problem. Here's a presentation that works.
And, if need be, I could have just done something on the fly instead.
8. depends on the nature of the presentation. if it is a coding workshop then live coding is actually quite a good idea.
A workshop is a different sort of animal.
1. All tech discussion is irrelevant unless it’s leetcode. Don’t fill my brain with any other useless, unproductive information.
2. How much time (points) will this presentation take to get to prod. Then how many points (time) will it take to deploy to prod. Do we need a spike for this presentation. I’m going to put it in the backlog and close it out since we’ll never get to it.
> Finally, watch out for events that put video of their sessions online. Having a couple of YouTube links of you doing your thing in front of a live, appreciate audience can make all the difference when a programme committee is looking at a handful of talks and can only accept one of them.
This, very much this.
I run a paid, one-day, mid-sized conference every year, and with only so many slots, we find it very, very difficult to risk choosing people who don't have videos of themselves speaking.
A short meetup talk or a lightning talk at a different conference could make all the difference towards being selected, because we need to know that you're vaguely capable of conveying what you want to share to the audience.
My professionally produced video is a bit old though I have others recorded on a webcam. I don't know how often they're looked at (and I know a lot of people on the conference committees) but it's certainly useful to have at least something.
I don't want videos of me online. Would an audio recording + slides suffice in your opinion? Or would you doubt it was really live in front of a sufficiently large audience? Idk how common fraud here would be
I feel like if you don't want videos (and I assume photos) of you online then speaking at a conference is probably not the aligned action to pursue that goal
Not sure if culture is different at other conferences but the ones I've been to had talk status recorded or not recorded. Requesting that pictures of you aren't shared online seems to be a common enough request
If you're the sort of private person who doesn't want a big online presence - why bother to speak at a software conference? Especially a conference big enough they're selective about who they allow to present?
About 90% of speakers at big events are there to promote their product, or to get their company's name out there for recruitment purposes, or to promote their consultancy, or to build their personal brand. If you don't give a shit about any of that stuff, maybe you don't need to bother?
I'd probably put it more diplomatically. But if you're speaking at a conference, there may be video, audio, and photographs which may be posted online and may be part of the terms you sign up for when you register. If any of that bothers you, you may not want to speak.
> I don't want videos of me online.
This is just my personal opinion, but your expertise in your proposed topic would have to be really good (i.e. you've written a few blog posts about it) for a conference to overlook this.
Recorded videos act as a portfolio for both potential speakers and conferences alike. I think some first-time attendees rely on past videos to determine whether a conference is worth going for.
(That said, we've set videos as unlisted for people who think that they've bombed their talks before — think leaving the stage in tears because the Q&A was harsh — but that's just goodwill.)
I don't know how often recorded videos are viewed--conference committees have to wade through a lot of applications.
But conference presentations are basically public events and if that bothers you, you should probably reconsider doing one. (Yes, per parent, if there's a real disaster--and those happen--they may be deep-sixed but I wouldn't count on it.)
> I don't know how often recorded videos are viewed--conference committees have to wade through a lot of applications.
For most conferences that do blind-rating first, only in subsequent rounds when the programme is being put together.
How common is that (outside of academia maybe -- which I have little familiarity with)?
Certainly when I've been on conference committees we tended to know a lot of the presenters and wouldn't have wanted to just rely on submissions. We knew who were experts on specific topics or were just good presenters.
Personally I would find a video that's slides with audio just as compelling as a video where the speaker was visible in terms of helping me understand if that person could give a competent presentation or not.
I imagine it'll go against your talk getting into the shortlist.
But there are some conferences that ask and respect your preference whether you'd like the video recording to have your face or just the audio. But I have yet to see a conference that go as far as asking the audience to not take photos of the presenter, so it's pretty much moot if you do not want your photos published at all.
i have seen presenters directly ask the audience to not take pictures. i think it's reasonable request, so i don't think it's a moot point.
Thank you for the thought you put into this. It's really frustrating when a speaker has an accent so strong it's unintelligible.
> I run a paid, one-day, mid-sized conference every year, and with only so many slots, we find it very, very difficult to risk choosing people who don't have videos of themselves speaking.
Some people are much more privacy-conscious than others and thus at least don't want more videos of themselves online than what is absolutely necessary.
It's the circle of those people even close to intersecting with the one for aspiring conference speakers?
New goal: to speak at DEFCON while wearing my dr doom mask to hide my identity
Okay, but what about the first time?
> Okay, but what about the first time?
Speak at your local meetup, and record yourself doing so if the meetup doesn't record the talks!
Meetups often have trouble finding speakers (well, many of the non-AI ones here do), so it's a win-win for both the meetup organisers and the budding conference speaker.
Another way to get your name out there is to speak at free (/low-cost), multi-track conferences like FOSDEM. Free conferences tend to be more receptive of first-time speakers because attendees didn't pay hundreds of dollars for their tickets.
(If you are an up-and-coming speaker, please don't let my comment discourage you from submitting their proposals to larger conferences. Some conferences have the resources and willing alumni to run speaker mentorship programs.)
You can record yourself speaking about some topic. The barrier to entry to making a video online these days is very very low.
Local meetups are very easy to get selected into, and they often have two or three speakers lined up, with a balance of speakers they know and are experienced, and new speakers.
Most of the time, the organizers are squeezed to find a speaker, so you are pretty much guaranteed to be offered a slot if you just ask the host.
do you record and post videos of your own?
The conference typically does it anyway, and otherwise you can ask a friend in the audience, or make a new friend who's willing to, or put a tiny tripod somewhere with your phone in camera-from-lockscreen mode. The point is showing that you can present on stage, so audio is most important I'd assume. It doesn't have to be amazing quality/angle
I'm not asking "do you think how good you are in your own criteria"
I'm asking "with such demands do you give back as well by recording and publishing talks people give to you?"
Public speaking plus blog posts did more for my career than my advanced engineering degrees. They lead to my past three places of employment. I did a talk or wrote a blog post, posted it to LI and then the decision makers reached out to me. This got me employment at workplaces I loved. I only write/ talk about things I enjoy, and they needed people with skills in the topics I wrote/ talk about. Perfect fit. I highly recommend this approach.
Perhaps your advanced engineering degrees enabled you to do public speaking and blogging?
What is LI?
Probably LinkedIn
Linked In
He's pretty right on the "get bored" bits. I have few friends that are doing a lot of conferences every year after, say, year 6, and they are people whose circumstances lead them to not wanting to spend much time at home, for one reason or another. At that point it's like a job with 30% travel: You either have few attachments, or are trying to avoid the ones you have.
I had a coworker in Seattle who commuted from the far side of Steven’s pass every day. That was a 2 hour trip each way. I desperately wanted to know what was up with her home life.
Some introverts can use a long solo car trip to wind themselves up to deal with people or decompress afterward so they don’t take it out on their family. Others find it all too stressful and just makes it worse. But that’s like 20 minutes for me. I can’t imagine two hours. We didn’t drive that long to get to grandma’s house.
I had about a 90 minute commute (by train or car/subway) at one point--about half the time because I did a lot of traveling. But couldn't have handled that long-term. Latterly, I had about a 2 hour commute into a city office--but rarely.
> people whose circumstances lead them to not wanting to spend much time at home, for one reason or another. At that point it's like a job with 30% travel: You either have few attachments, or are trying to avoid the ones you have.
Or a couple loves to travel and conferences are a good excuse.
In semi-retirement, I very selectively pick a few conferences to travel to in locations I want to be, at appropriate times of year, in interesting venues. Definitely less than I used to do.
Interesting take; thanks for sharing.
One minor tangent (aiming for helpfulness, not pedantry), "I have few" reads as "I don't have many" (emphasizes the low number), whereas "I have a few" emphasizes the fact there's more than one -- which from context was clearly your intent. HTH!
I've given many talks at conferences, meetups, and otherwise. My number one piece of advice is to /really/ know your subject. Sometimes I am asked to present something I don't already intimately know, and it can be tempting to put together a presentation and learn just enough to present, but it's MUCH better to really go deep and learn the subject fully. Why?
1. Competence creates confidence, and confidence creates trust.
2. You can answer questions, pretty much any question, and if you can't you can let the audience know graciously without coming off as unknowledgable.
3. It makes it easier to present well, because you don't need to or are not tempted to read from the slides, you're telling a story or sharing information in a natural way, off the dome, using the slides only as a topic guide because you already fully understand everything about the subject.
I have found this to be so important, that I sometimes /choose/ to present something I'm interested in but don't know well (with enough lead time) as a jumping off point to dig deep into it. I have long believed if you want to really understand something, the benchmark for having achieved competence is successfully teaching that subject to another person and seeing them succeed with it.
This is a great list. As someone who has spoken at hundreds of conferences, there's one piece of advise I give younger speakers, particularly those nervous about how the audience will receive them. Dylan alludes to this in a different context
> Finally: respect your audience. Whether you’re talking to five people at a meetup, fifty at a community event, or five thousand at a huge international conference: those people are the reason you get to do this. They have given up their time - and often a substantial amount of money - to hear what you have to say. They deserve your best shot, every time
This is the same thing I say except, them _choosing_ to attend your talk, and opting in to giving you their time and attention is a signal that they _want_ you to succeed. They are HOPING you deliver your message, and that your demos all work, and that you conclude well. If kept in mind, I believe this can help alleviate some of the anxiety.
Sidebar: I've done this for a very long time and I still get nervous at the beginning of every talk. And I will be the first to admit—you WILL run into the occasional show off in the audience who is intent on demonstrating to you (and to the rest of room) how much smarter or more experienced they are than the speaker. That will happen—but it's an aberration.
Fellow speaker, and a large part of my "speaking with confidence" breakthrough was realizing this point exactly.
The other key unlock for me was the realization that I was the ONLY one in the entire room who would know when I fumbled a word or didn't deliver the content on each slide absolutely perfectly.
This year I spoke at HOPE - Hackers On Planet Earth. The topic was "Hacking ATMs: past and present". I really enjoyed it, it took a lot to prepare though. I haven't gotten any monetary benefit from it, but I would definitely do it again.
HOPE is one of the best hacker conferences, and it's somehow [subjectively] friendlier than other. Feels like home, so if you're on hacker news, I guess you wanna speak at hacker conference or contribute to 2600? ^_^
I’ve been doing public speaking for my entire adult life, but not for a living.
That said, it’s not my strong suit. Others are far better at it than I am.
This is one of those areas where folks can make money/satisfy ego, so there’s a ton of competition. I’m not competitive, and am not interested in making money doing this kind of thing, so I don’t really try.
I do appreciate folks that are good at it, though; especially when I want to learn. A skilled orator can make learning a lot more fun, and can be very motivating.
> That said, it’s not my strong suit. Others are far better at it than I am.
I don't know you, and I feel the same about my public speaking but I suspenct that there's a lot of imposter syndrom in that
I’m comfortable doing it, and generally receive positive responses, but I’m not “a natural.”
If I have something that I need to “get just right,” like a class or main speaker gig, I have to practice a lot, and can come across as a bit “stiff.” If I don’t practice, I do well, but not predictably so, which makes me a bit of a “wildcard.”
I know quite a few folks that can walk up to a podium, in front of hundreds of people, at little notice, and knock it out of the park. They often practice.
Steve Jobs was one of the best public speakers I ever heard, and I’m told that he used to practice for hours. I knew a woman (I’m friends with her ex) that used to regularly appear on TV, and keynote finance conferences. She has an “aw shucks,” casual style. Her (ex) husband told me that she’d practice before each gig for many hours.
The folks that make it seem to be “natural,” at anything, generally practice a lot. I speak frequently, but it’s not structured practice.
I suppose it's a combination, some people are more comfortable speaking and improvising on the spot but everyone needs to practice. I can add to your list a CEO of a big bank, he speaks freely and it's a pleasent to listen to him, but I heard that he practice using a private instructor as well
That's insightful! Thanks for sharing. I've been applying to conferences recently to present an open-source library I built (a unified client for AI providers), but I haven't gotten any responses yet. I think the project is solid—it basically lets you switch from OpenAI to Anthropic in one line of code—but I suspect my CFP (Call for Papers) abstracts are failing to hook the organizers. For those here who review CFPs: Do you prefer abstracts that focus on the "Technical How-To" (e.g., 'How to standardize I/O layers') or the "Story/Philosophy" (e.g., 'Why we need primitives, not frameworks')? I feel like I might be getting too technical too fast.
I like the general idea, and I owe so much for the talks and bloposts. That said, I really miss the old deep boring technical talks with speakers with an attitude of "I do not care if you meet the tecnical (and probably cognitive in some several cases) requirements to be in this room".
I used to go in talks in the late 2000s and the difference with talks now in the mid-2020s is that the speakers now are so good and well-crafted, the slides way more professional, and the storytelling is so compelling, and... that's the issue(?) for me.
The strange loop maybe was the last bastion of tech conference where I could check in those kinds if speakers.
There are so many aspects of topic accessibility and formatting that some of the open-ended parts of a technical argument or some not-said parts are not in the presentations anymore.
Beforehand I used to go to some talks and literally take notes on 90% of the things, and back home I started to do some research about it, and eventually I learned 70% of it, and I started to have at least 2% that made some difference in my daily work.
Now the talks are so well structured that I do not see most of the time the open-ended unsaid topic that could be an intellectual side quest, given how well the presenter placed it and made it uninteresting for me, or they do not talk about this open-ended aspect at all, and it never sparked my curiosity.
Maybe it's not such a sophisticated analogy, but the old format would be like reading a book and piecing together a lot of not-explicit points from the author, and the other one is like having the same book in a cinematic experience with a well-crafted screenplay, costumes, dialog, and so on.
> The strange loop maybe was the last bastion of tech conference where I could check in those kinds if speakers.
Strange Loop was amazing. The vibes were perfect. And I've never been to another tech conference that I found to be so mind expanding. Most of the talks I'd attend had no practical utility in my daily life, but got me thinking about all sorts of what ifs and if/how I could apply some nugget of what they were saying to more practical applications.
If your presentation requires a custom software installation, give the audience the instructions as a hand out/script so you can focus on the important part.
I once did a breakout about a Geo support in Django, but the presenter spent the entire time helping people install PostgreSQL with geo support for an entire morning. We never ran a single line of Django code when the presentation was over.
I have run a ColdFusion users group in East Lansing for the past twenty five years. I have helped many first time speakers and this is some outstanding advice.
Although I have never done it myself I can also recommend Toastmasters. Seen some speakers soar after attending this group for a year. You wouldn't even think that it was the same person presenting. Having that experience of public speaking can also greatly accelerate your career.
The idea that East Lansing, Michigan, can support a regular gathering of ColdFusion users in 2025 is the most astonishing thing I've learned in quite some time. Consider me quite impressed.
They met tonight! This is so insane!
rmason- I love how supportive you are of tech groups in Michigan. I’m trying to organize an Anthropic meetup, and you helped provide some great advice. Your love of tech and community is evident.
I struggled for a long time to figure out what would be "interesting enough" to give a talk about. Turns out that the way that we do different things in Next.js was not talked about enough. Did my first technical talk about some decisions and mechanisms that Next.js uses for dynamic detection and rendering and found a sweet spot.
Never speak for free at events held at for-profit companies.
They will try to convince you to work for free for the "exposure."
It's one of those few times where exposure is actually beneficial though.
I haven't checked these links for a very long time, but some presentation resources I accumulated when I was frequently giving talks:
https://gist.github.com/macintux/5354837
I just wrote (with some AI help) a recently fast rrb tree implementation for c# [0]. I am waiting for the phone calls, but so far I have gotten nothing in 24h. Maybe if I figure out how to use docfx...
[0]: https://github.com/bjoli/RrbList/tree/main/src/Collections
If no one else is aware, Dylan is one of the best conference talkers in the industry. A rare combination of technical knowledge, experience and fantastic to watch if you ever get the chance.
Thank you. Very kind of you to say so.
>They have given up their time - and often a substantial amount of money - to hear what you have to say. They deserve your best shot, every time.
Oh wow, this, 1,000x this!
My issue is that the next ladder rung involves going out and doing presentations at conferences and the like. However... I did that 10 years ago, it feels like I'm past that. A lot of things now feel like I've done them 10 years ago. Which makes me think, should I have been earning what I do now back then? It feels the wrong way around.
Good article, just wanted to add that the time from idea to international speaker can be weeks/months, not necessarily years, depending on your niche
Sure, it happens. Especially if somebody is already well known and respected in their field.
But it is not common, and I find it frustrating how many people think they can fast-track their way to the bigger events. I've been on the committee that rejects their submissions and find myself having to diplomatically explain to them "you've never done this before, nobody has any idea who you are, you've done nothing to establish your credibility regarding this topic, and you were one of 1500 submissions for 50 available slots... sorry, kid, that's not how this works."
I did not mean to imply that steps could be skipped, just that they can be orchestrated more rapidly in some niches where there are a lot of conferences
>> Write a talk nobody else could do; tell a story nobody else can tell. Figure out what your audience is going to learn, and why you’re the best person to teach them that.
That's an extremely high bar, no?
One of the best topics for new speakers is "here's what I learned when I built project X".
Nobody else in the world could give that talk, because they didn't build that project.
It doesn't matter if you're not presenting anything that's ground breaking and new - what's important is that your audience gets to benefit from the same lessons that you learned.
Even if some members of the audience already knew those lessons, hearing a new way of explaining them - with new supporting stories - is still valuable.
No, it means you have something unique to say.
The bar is there, but it is lower than you expect. If you have a truly unique point of view to express, that brings some value to the table, slots will open up.
And I've spoken at plenty of conferences. :) Not always in the glamour rooms/slots. But... I did have one talk fill a room out the door. That was a talk on a difficult/controversial topic, and by then... I was probably about as expert as they came on the issue.
I didn't start with that though. I just started with a simple point of view talk. And I'd argue the second version of that talk is still one of the best I've given in my life.
That doesn't mean every talk has to be unique and special. An "introduction to XYZ" talk may have a bunch of equally valid speakers, which all naturally provide a slightly different angle and there is a bunch of factors going in the decision about who gets the slot.
Some talks are plain craftswork, not unique experiences and still very worthwhile.
It can. But I don't want to compete for my slot with others who can give the same talk, or a talk that is similar.
I want to make the conference committee choose between "Do we want ilc's talk on X." or "Do we want foo's talk on Y." If we are both discussing the same thing, if I'm unknown, I will lose. OTOH, if I have something interesting to talk about... I have 2 routes to "victory". "ilc gives great talks, he gets good grades and is working on his skills." and "Man that's a damn cool topic. We want that at our conference, even if ilc isn't the BEST speaker, the combo is better."
I didn't start out as the best presenter. I learned. But I always knew I had to have an interesting topic, something that made it worth them giving me a slot.
I don't think the author meant that you have to be the world leading expert at any topic. You can be pretty average, but you need to give it your personal twist. He is warning against very generic abstract talks that can be replaced by reading a man page.
No, it's about perspective - I know that 'cos I wrote the article, but perhaps it didn't come across very clearly!
Here's the specific problem that advice is intended to remedy, which I have seen happen many, many times:
Somebody writes a talk about, say, what's new in C# 13. It's a solid talk: they've done the research, they've prepared some good demos. At local user groups, it does very well. At regional and community conferences, it does very well.
But it doesn't have any personality. It's not a case study. It's not based on using those features in production, or applying them to a specific domain. The presenter has read all the docs, run all the examples, maybe found an edge case or two, and put together a decent slide deck and some engaging demos - but even if they've done a fantastic job, there are a thousand other tech presenters out there who could do exactly the same thing.
They then start submitting that talk to big conferences which have a .NET track, and it never gets accepted.
Why? Because those conferences have people like Mads Torgersen, the actual lead designer of C# at Microsoft, on speed dial. If NDC Oslo or CraftConf or Yow! wants to fly somebody in to talk about what's new in C#, they can get the person who wrote those docs to do it.
Now, consider that talk was "how I used C# 13 to rebuild my smart home dashboard", or "how my team used C# 13 to save $5000 a month in AWS bills", or "I built an online game server using C# 13". Those kinds of talks do well because they have personality; there's more there than just the technology itself.
That's what I mean by "a story nobody else can tell" - it's a presentation that's anchored in the speaker's own real world experience; detail and context that hitherto only existed in their head.
I run presentation workshops for software professionals, and one of the things I ask my students to do is to come up with something - doesn't have to be tech-related - that they know better than anybody else in the group. We've had folks talk about how to cook ragu, how to surf on a longboard, how to get their kid to fall asleep ("literally nobody else in the world can do this, not even my wife"), and it is always remarkable to me how much more engaging and animated people become when they are telling their own story rather than paraphrasing research.
That's how I read it as well. I think it's wrong because I've learned the most from people one step ahead of me. Experts who are ten steps ahead have the curse of knowledge: it's extra hard to figure out what things make sense to a conference audience. Many presentations go too fast and then too slow two minutes later
Someone who just learned a thing is in the best position to give you the diff to learn it as well. At least, that was my experience running a blog as a teenager. I wrote about cool things I just learned or realised and people found that useful
Edited to add: Also, impostor syndrome. With this as the "first step" advise, you'll select people who are full of themselves and nobody else would give presentations unless their topic is super niche (not useful for most people) or they got lucky to see some big story up close (if you had a front seat during a Github outage, say). The latter is both interesting and fun but it's not the only type of talk I want to see
It's doable if you pick a very focused topic. In my first year of using Julia, I gave a talk on gradually adding Julia to a large Python codebase. Very few people could give a similar talk because (1) Julia is a fairly niche language, (2) most of the people who understood Julia <> Python interop knew it too well, and had forgotten all the common beginner challenges.
It is an extremely high bar if you aim for super popular topics.
You might want to spend time on some niche topic and there might be people who don’t have time to dabble in that topic but would be happy if someone did it for them.
Yes, it's bullshit.
I wouldn't expect that most people couldn't, with enough time and resources, tell a better story. Isn't the part of the point of giving a talk to convey the ideas so that other people can use them? If they've internalized the ideas and seen your presentation, can't they then improve it and give a better talk? Haven't you failed if they can't do that?
Does me being the best person to teach them matter? Doesn't it matter more that I am the person teaching them when no one else is?
There's room for personalization, making sure the talk compliments your style and gives insight into why you think it's important and how you solved it, but none of this really relies on the uniqueness of the person.
If Stallman got up and gave a talk on "what it's like to be me", I would find it much less interesting than a talk about "how to invent free software and build a movement around it".
Stallman can give a talk about "how to invent free software and build a movement around it" because Stallman has invented free software and built a movement around it. For Stallman, there is a significant overlap between "what it's like to be me" and "how to invent free software" - his version of that story is exactly the story nobody else can tell.
It's not about telling a better story. It's about telling a story better.
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I feel like while this is a great start for how to get practice giving talks, it could do with some expansion on how to make a great presentation.
One tip I've found really useful over the past few years is to always try and include a "STAR moment" in a talk - where STAR stands for "Something They'll Always Remember".
Effectively it means try and have at least one memorable surprise or gimmick in your talk. If someone watches a dozen talks at a conference you want them to be able to say "Oh, I remember your talk, it was the one with ..." when they meet you in the corridor.
I deployed my pelican on a bicycle benchmark as a STAR moment last year and it was really effective: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/six-months-in-llms/
At PyCon a couple of years ago I used a vibe-coded counter of the number of times I said "AI" out loud: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/14/pycon/#pycon-2024.043....
Yup. This. As long as people remember you for something positive, you'll get a second speaking slot.
Personally it rapping and wigs. They both go down surprisingly well at tech confs!
I wrote a bit about this in my blog post on the same topic: https://www.simeongriggs.dev/how-to-give-a-great-conference-...
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FOMO is the only reason people attend conferences, which is why I visited a few to figure out whether I was missing out on anything.
Speaking at a conference? Same story. You do it, because it's for "personal development", until it's pointless.
Conferences have n00bs and PMs, not the experts, because they don't need to learn anything anymore.
> Conferences have n00bs and PMs, not the experts, because they don't need to learn anything anymore.
The real experts never stop learning.
Some of them go to conferences because that's one of the few times in the year they can hang out with each other, and find out what their community is up to.
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actually, the primary reason to go to conferences is networking. meeting people, make connections. you go to talks that interest you so you can meet people that share your interest.
same for giving presentations. you give presentations to promote an idea or work, to share something you have learned, to contribute to the community, and again, for networking.
fomo? not at all. personal development? that's a bonus, but not the motivation.