What I'd like to see is an ounce of professionalism in most technical presentations. I'm not easily offended by swearing, but I am offended by content. For ex

What I'd like to see is an ounce of professionalism in most technical presentations. I'm not easily offended by swearing, but I am offended by content. For example, a couple years back at jQueryConf in Boston I just walked out of a talk. In the first 10 min. the presenter had said "fuck" about 17 times and managed to make an MS joke. That's not Microsoft mind you, that's multiple sclerosis. In most contexts I wouldn't have cared, but I paid $300 to attend that conference and it was pretty evident that this guy wasn't going to provide any actual content in his talk. Most tech talks I've seen in the past 5 years have been terrible. I see the presenters tweeting that they still need to do their slides while flying to the conference. Obviously they haven't rehearsed that all and it shows in their presentation. They read from the slides. The code examples don't work. They throw up pictures of lolcats and other memes to get a cheap laugh. And occasionally they'll swear to seem edgy. Most of this is mistaken as connecting with the audience. It's sorta like when you watch a horror movie that just throws in a loud noise all of a sudden to startle you. The result is that you appear scared but you can still walk away and think it was a bad movie. The best talks I've seen have been practiced to the point that they seem natural. The presenter knows his content thoroughly. The slides are informative and all support the content of the talk. The talk isn't a thinly veiled vendor pitch for the presenter's consultancy or company. The talk isn't also just a summary of introductory information. There's real substance. Whether swearing is used or not seems to have little impact on that, but in my experience the best presenters manage to deliver a compelling talk by throwing out cheap rhetoric.