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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 slide
by WalterBright 11mo ago
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
- WalterBright 11mo agoOh, 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.)
- ghaff 11mo agoI 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.
- onion2k 11mo ago13. 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.
- myhf 11mo agoit's physically painful for me to stop talking about my topic
- WalterBright 11mo agoLOL. I get writers' cramp every time I write a check.
- reactordev 11mo agoThat’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.
- fouc 11mo agoit's physically painful for everyone else to listen to you talking about your topic.. if you talk for too long that is. :)
- laurieg 11mo ago> 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.
- WalterBright 11mo agoI still have it, but it goes away as soon as I start the presentation. Then it just becomes fun!
- koolba 11mo agoA shot or two of liquid courage doesn’t hurt either. Though beyond that you risk exceeding the Balmer peak.
- WalterBright 11mo agoDon't drink coffee before going on stage. At least when you're old like me.
- javawizard 11mo agoThat's not what liquid courage means ;) (Though that is otherwise good advice!)
- cess11 11mo agoI don't think I'm alone in finding it quite suspect if people walk around smelling of "liquid courage" in professional settings.
- ghaff 11mo agoYeah, 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."
- firecall 11mo agoAbove all else, make it interesting and entertaining! Which should go without saying…
- bruce511 11mo agoIn 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.
- em-bee 11mo ago8. depends on the nature of the presentation. if it is a coding workshop then live coding is actually quite a good idea.
- WalterBright 11mo agoA workshop is a different sort of animal.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo agoWhat is the best way to show code? I really want to show some code. Like 4-5 lines to give a gist.
- KeplerBoy 11mo agoJust 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).
- WalterBright 11mo agoI 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.
- viraptor 11mo agoAnd 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.
- thiht 11mo agoThe 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).
- MrJohz 11mo ago4-5 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.
- b800h 11mo ago> 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.
- cess11 11mo agoMight want to link the talk, he's a rather prolific speaker.
- 2rsf 11mo ago> 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
- WalterBright 11mo ago> 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.
- MrJohz 11mo agoGenerally, 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.
- lopis 11mo ago> 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.
- lloeki 11mo agoAnother 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.
- WalterBright 11mo ago> 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
- skylurk 11mo agoI 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 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r-A78RgMhZU
- bgro 11mo ago1. 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.
- th0rine 11mo ago#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 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!
- WalterBright 11mo agoYup!