Give a Great Tech Talk

Give a Great Tech Talk Josh Berkus Ian Dees

Table of Contents
About Us
Software Developers
Experienced Speakers
Thought Leaders
How to Prepare For a Talk
Finding rehearsal space is important.
Hiring a Professional Designer to Make Sure Your Slides Are GREAT!
Giving a presentation
Effective Slide Reading
The Lectern is your Friend
After Your Talk
Monetizing Your Content
AdSense
Selling in the Kindle Store

About Us
Josh
Education
Brentwood Elementary, Gainesville, FL
Claremont Colleges – Degree in Art!
Projects
Postgres, CivicDB, NoiseBridge
Ian
Pets
Cats
Osiris
Black
Peanut
Harley
Dogs
Maybe one day!
Hobbies
Lots, just ask!

Give a Great Tech Talk
How to prepare for a talk
Nobody cares about your slides
… but make good ones anyway
Seven Habits of Ineffective Speakers
Audience Interaction 101
Curate your code examples
When the demo crashes
Audience outside the lecture hall

Q&A period at end
We'll make sure to have time
Write down your questions
or put them on the wiki:
http://opensourcebridge.org/2010/wiki /Give_a_Great_Tech_Talk

1. Preparing for Your Talk Speaker Exercise #1

Know Your Topic
You know a lot about
Currently topical
You're enthusiastic about
You can cover in the time allotted

Know Your Timeslot

Basic Timeslots
5 Minutes Lightning Talk
one small topic very briefly
45 Minutes Regular talk, no Q&A
1 Hour Regular Talk with Q&A
one major topic with some depth
2-3 Hours Tutorial
entire tool or technology

Basic Timeslots
5 Minutes Lightning Talk
“5 CSS Tags You Didn't Know”
45 Minutes Regular talk, no Q&A
1 Hour Regular Talk with Q&A
“Simple CSS Techniques to Improve Your Site”
2-3 Hours Tutorial
“Introduction to CSS-based Web Design”

Use a timer!

Know Your Audience

Who Are They?
Professions?
Ages?
Culture?
From where?
Groups?

What do they want?
Why are they at the conference?
What is their interest in your topic?
How much do they know already?
What style/format do they expect?
Do they have things in common you can refer to?

OpenSourceBridge “ Analyze query plans to find the “go faster” button”

pgCon “ Find chronic performance issues in your discarded query plans”

SIGCSE “ Discarded plan analysis as a method for teaching query optimization”

8 Steps for Talk Preparation
Create some notes
Come up with a story
Write a script
Work out timings
Create slides
Rehease
Revise
Rehearse again

5 Basic Stories for Talks
From Ignorance to Knowledge
Quest / Solving a Problem
Top-to-Bottom or Bottom-to-Top
Theme & Variations
The Catalog

Rehearse!
Do a run-through of the entire presentation
out loud, standing up
You'll figure out the timings
You'll discover things which need to be changed
Video helps!

Speaker Exercise #2

2. Nobody Cares About Your Slides

3. But Make Good Ones Anyway

You Don't Have To Be Me

One Idea, One Slide

When You Stand, They See Slides When You Move, They See You

On Themes

Do I Have To Use Their Theme?

Light on Dark, or Dark on Light?

Heraldry

Metal vs. Color
Metals
Yellow
White
Colors
Black
Blue
Red
Green
Purple
Brown

Point Size Is Your Barometer

4. The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Speakers

1. Chained To Your Chair (or Podium)

2. About Me
Education
Brentwood Elementary School, Gainesville Florida
Claremont Colleges – Degree in Art!
Projects
PostgreSQL database project
CivicDB
Noisebridge
pgReplay
Accomplishments
Founded first company at age of 28
Once shook hands with Esther Dyson
Predicted the dot-com crash
Nobel Prize for Peace for ending vi/emacs flamewar

About Us

3. Presenting For The Blind

Presenting for the Blind
Presenting for the Blind is where you read every line of every slide.
It is extremely boring.
It also gives the audience the impression that you either think that they're illiterate, or that you've never seen these slides before.
Maybe you haven't.
You can also read your notes directly off the page.
A monotone is recommended.

4. Dr. Bronner's School of Slide Design

5. Bait & Switch

7 points in description vs. 3 points covered

Working Code & Demo vs. Just Slides

Expert Level vs. Beginner Level

Beginner Level vs. Expert Level

In-depth Technical vs. Brochureware

Grab Bag Presenting
Including random crap which has nothing to do with the main topic of the presentation.
(often at the behest of your employer)
“ Hey, Josh has a presentation at Open Source Bridge! We can get him to include a slide about Glassfish!”

6. Time is an Illusion

You don't need to watch the clock
Your audience will wait for you!
No matter how long it takes.
Don't worry about pacing
Don't worry about rehearsing
Don't worry about the next speaker
Don't worry about lunch

7. Panic

Six Stages of Panic
Apologize to the audience
Keep trying to get the demo or slides to work
Apologize to the audience again
Sit down and start hacking on your laptop to get it to work
Apologize some more
End the session early

7 Ineffective Habits
Chained to chair/podium
About Me/Us
Presenting for the Blind
Too Much Crap on Each Slide
Bait & Switch
Lose Track of Time
Panic

7 Effective Habits
Move Around
Get Right Into the Talk
Don't Read
Sparse, Well-Designed Slides
Stick to the Topic
Pace Yourself and Track Time

5. Audience Interaction 101

Eye Contact

Body Language

Asking for a Response
Wakes the audience up
Ask about them
change your talk emphasis
Find out if you're boring them
critical in after-lunch and end-of-day spots

Jokes
Even better way to wake up the audience
and relax them
Hard to get right
many jokes fall flat
some can offend people
Investigate current affairs for your audience
Beta-test your jokes

Taking Questions
Throughout talk
End of each section
End of the talk
… just let audience know!

Questions you can't answer

That Guy in The Third Row

Jesus in the Audience

Audience Participation
Small-medium audiences
Choose the right person
Plan it carefully
limited scope
timing
materials
Be ready to abort & do something else

6. Curate Your Code Examples

def snippetize (self): with ZipFile( 'all.key' ) as original: with ZipFile( 'out.key' , 'w' ) as updated: for item in original.filelist: if item.filename ! = 'index.apxl' : contents = original.read(item.filename) updated.writestr(item, contents) raw = original.read( 'index.apxl' ) # Find snippets in the source tree doc = minidom.parseString(raw) pattern = '//sf:shape[starts-with(@sf:href,'http://localhost/')]' strip = 'http://localhost/' finder = Finder(doc, pattern, strip)

# Find snippets in the source tree doc = minidom.parseString(raw) pattern = "//sf:shape[starts-with(" "@sf:href,'http://localhost/')]" strip = "http://localhost/" finder = Finder(doc, pattern, strip)

Does That Mean I Have To Rewrite All My Examples?

Using TextMate?
Slush & Poppies (light)
Blackboard (dark)
Inconsolata / Consolas
Bundles ‣ TextMate ‣ Create HTML ...

Using Something Else?
Convert to HTML with http://pygments.org
Copy and paste from browser

Lots of Slides?
Auto-update your snippets
http://github.com/undees/snippetize

Start With the Big Three
“Create your slides in some standard slide software like Keynote, OpenOffice Impress or PowerPoint.”
Andy Lester

But If You're Ready to Move On

Showoff
Code and shell sessions
http://github.com/schacon/showoff

There's Always More Code!

7. When Your Demo Crashes

Your demo will crash

3 things to count on
Conference internet will fail … during your talk
The hardware will fail … in unprecedented ways
The software will fail … in unreproduceable ways

7 ways to avoid demo failure
Be unambitious
Test the hardware
Drill demo repeatedly
Rewindable VMs
Fake your demo
Alternative demo
Never do “cascading” demos

Fake your demos
screenshots
video
shell history
recorded shell sessions (ttyrec)
interactive shell scripts (IO::prompt)

8. The Audience Outside the Lecture Hall

Speaker Notes Who are they for? Not the speaker!

Speaker Notes If the speaker notes for this slide were to include literally everything I plan on saying, like what you see here on the slide, then it would be way too much text for that tiny little text window at the bottom of the screen.

Audio Audio or notes; you don't need both

Sharing

SlideShare http://www.slideshare.net/faqs/slidecast

YouTube Export slides + audio to movie

Your Podcast Host Wiki for “Enhanced Podcast”

More Information
Josh Berkus
[email_address]
www.pgexperts.com
Links on OSB Wiki:
http://opensourcebridge.org/2010/wiki /Give_a_Great_Tech_Talk
Ian Dees
[email_address]
ian.dees.name
This presentation copyright 2010 Josh Berkusa and Ian Dees, licensed for distribution under the Creative Commons Share-Alike License, except for photos, most of which were stolen from other people's websites via images.google.com, and Sun presentations, the copyright on which is available at low, low rates.

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Give a Great Tech Talk

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